Vision.

At 4:06 P.M. on a Friday, a man pulls up in front of the shop on a ten speed bicycle. It appears to be at least twenty years old. The man himself appears to be somewhere between sixty and seventy. The bike has several little plastic grocery sacks tied to its handlebars, bearing the names of other local shops. It is clearly his primary means of transportation.

The man is a tall, mocha-pigmented black man, perhaps six-foot-two, with what, quite unusually, appears to be naturally dark blond hair and beard. His clothes are little more than rags; his denim overshirt is frayed at the cuffs, his sandals falling apart around his feet. Everything he is wearing has faded to several shades lighter than its original hue: his denim shirt has drained from dark blue to pastel, his undershirt from red to pink. Great, I think, bum. Then I think of how hot it’s been lately, and, forgive me for this thought, I imagined how ripe he was probably going to smell.

Something interrupts this line of reasoning, gently applies the brakes and steers it in a different direction: the street people I see don’t usually wear faded clothes; they wear dirty clothes. I look again: there are large bleach spots all over the man’s shirt; the socks underneath his sandals are white as unbroken light. These are clothes that have been washed, hundreds of times, over many years, and obviously quite recently. The shopping bags suspended from his bicycle are new and unwrinkled, recent purchases. None of this quite fits the profile I’ve assigned him moments earlier.

As the man is repositioning the plastic sacks, the four o’clock rush hits. Cars descend from nowhere, the pump-authorization alerts wail as if there’s an imminent air raid, and a ten person line forms before my register. My tramp is dead last in line. The line moves slowly, the scourge of this plastic money age in which people seem unable to resist paying for small purchases via PIN debit transactions that take ten times as long as their cash equivalents. When the tramp approaches at last, I thank him for his patience, the industry-standard apology for a long wait.

There is no need, though. The man radiates patience. He exudes serenity and peace. The calm, unforced smile on his face as he sets his two fountain drinks and bottle of vinegar on the counter draws me into his little envelope of content.

I ring up his purchases: the bill for the three items comes to $3.34. He hands me four dollars and, when I return his 66 cents in change, promptly drops it into the plastic “leave a penny/take a penny” bin beside the cash register.

“Would you like a bag today, sir?” I inquire.

“Nah,” he replies, “I don’t think so. You have a nice day now.” I believe that he actually means it. I watch him walk outside and find room in a bag from another store for his purchases. He didn’t take a bag from me because he already knew he didn’t need it. I remove his change from the bin and set it above the drawer, to break into pennies as later necessary.

I have just been in the presence of a mystic, a sage who wants nothing because he knows that he already has everything, who lives by his needs and gives of the little that he has. I feel a sense of wonder and awe that an angel has been sent into my convenient store, and a twinge of envy that when this man dies he will melt away into Nirvana, stroll unassumingly through the back door of heaven, while I’m busy being reborn 40,000 more times or rotting in Purgatory or whatever while I work out why I assumed initially that he was a vagrant. My hell, as Peter Gabriel once wrote, will be a big hell—and I will walk through the front door.

It is 4:46, the calm between the on-the-hour, post-work flurries of business that define any convenient store. A boy of perhaps seven comes in and picks up a pink Critter Rose, a nylon flower in a plastic tube with one of several fuzzy, brightly colored toy insects attached. His sports a purple dragonfly.

“How much is this?”

“It comes to $1.06 with tax,” I explain, as children tend not to be so adept with the concept.

“This is what I have,” he says, opening his palm and exposing seven dimes. “It’s my mom’s birthday today, and I forgot to get her anything.”

I take his seven dimes, and add 36 cents from the sage’s donation to it, ringing up the piece of gimcrack that will doubtless bring a smile to the child’s mother’s face. “Somebody else got the rest of it for you,” I say. “Tell your mother that the guy at the gas station said happy birthday.”

I realize, after the boy happily strolls away, that I have just completed a tiny miracle begun by another, witnessed Providence at work, whatever theological construct tickles the fancy. It is beyond my skill to relate the unique feeling of that recognition.

And people have the nerve to ask me why I work here.