He said his name was William.  I met him in a park downtown.  I worked across the street and liked to eat my lunch on the benches in the park.  He came to feed the pigeons sometimes.  They seemed to know him.  They came to greet him even before he took out his brown bag of stale popcorn.  He always wore the same clothes, an oversized brown suit and vest with a beat up old hat and a great big overcoat.  After seeing each other in the park several times we started exchanging greetings.  He seemed content to be alone with his birds, and I didn’t want to impose.  But I found myself thinking of him while I was working, wondering if I would see him today.  I made up stories about him, who he was, why he came to the park, what his life was like.  Finally one day I gathered up my courage and sat down with him on his bench.  He always sat on the same bench.  I said “Good afternoon”, and he nodded to me and went about the business of feeding the birds.  We sat in silence awhile, him feeding his pigeons, and me sitting there feeling uncomfortable and trying to think of something to say.  I was just about to give up and leave when he asked me if I worked near the park.  I told him I did, and introduced myself.  We talked of trivial things for a time; about my job and the weather.  Then it was time for me to go.  When I got back to work, I realized that I had told him about myself, but I still knew nothing about him.  I resolved to ask him some questions about his life the next time I saw him.  The next day, I took off for my lunch break early, and got to the park before he arrived.  William always came to the park at 12:15.  I sat on his bench and waited for him.  When he arrived, he smiled at me, sat down and went about his ritual feeding.  I marveled at the way the birds seemed to come out of nowhere when he arrived.  He told me he got the popcorn from the dumpster behind a nearby theater.  He said there was always popcorn there, you just had to break open the garbage bags.  That night, after work, I went to the theater dumpsters and collected some popcorn of my own.  When I showed up the next day, he was pleased, and we fed the birds together.  I offered him half of my sandwich, but he refused.  After a bit of prodding however, he caved in and accepted.  That became something of a ritual between us in the following couple of months.  I would offer him half of my sandwich, he’d refuse, then later accept after I pestered him for a while.  He’d always complain that my sandwiches never had any meat in them.  We met in that park on the same bench almost every weekday if the weather permitted it.  Whenever the weather didn’t permit it, I would sit in my office and wonder what he did on those cold and rainy days.

            He said he’d been coming to the park for a long time.  I believed him.  Many of the people who walked through the park smiled and said hello to him.  But nobody seemed to know his name.  William was 84, and too thin (a point I’d always make in the sandwich-giving ritual).  His wife had died five years earlier.  They had been married for over fifty years.  He met her when he was on leave from the army.  Her name was Loretta, and he said he missed her a great deal.  His children had grown up and moved out a long time ago.  He didn’t like to talk about them.  I think they had some sort of falling out somewhere in the past.

            William liked to talk about his life with Loretta.  He talked about how they had lived in Milwaukee almost all their lives.  They used to go bowling every Tuesday.  He said he missed that.  I looked at him and thought how funny it would be to see little William tossing a bowling ball down the lane.  He spoke of how the city had changed.  He told me about the buildings that used to surround the park, and when the streetcars still ran.  He used to ride them as a child.

            I liked to listen to William tell his stories, and he seemed to like to tell them to me.  I don’t know if they were all true, but I know I didn’t care.  Then one day in August, William stopped coming to the park.  I went and waited for him every day.  By this time the pigeons had come to know me as well, and they came to greet me each day as I arrived with a new bag of stale popcorn.  After two weeks, I realized my friend William wasn’t coming back.  But I kept going to his bench every day anyway.  At the end of September I had finished my job downtown and had decided I would move to Texas for the winter.  And so I stopped going to the park.  Every once in awhile I go back there.  I always hope to see William.  The pigeons have forgotten me, but I haven’t forgotten William.  Perhaps they haven’t either.