Don't Read Anything Into This

He doesn’t appear to be an imposing man – maybe 5’10 or so if that. Slight frame, a nondescript form. You’d pass him on the street and never look twice – if it wasn’t for the eyes. Two of the saddest eyes I’ve ever seen. He's a nobody, he's anybody, he's somebody now; a first generation Irishman, born and bred on the blue-collar streets of Dorchester, Massachusetts. His parents emigrated here from Ireland God knows when; Irish and Catholic and there were two things in his house you never did. You never took the Lord’s name in vain and you never crossed a picket line. Jesus didn’t look kindly on scabs. Dad was a union man to the core.

He wears the face of an unpainted clown. Gunmetal gray-blue eyes deeply set and profoundly curved in a downward, melancholy turn. If he adorned his visage with white Pan-Cake, or even the garish wide-set blood red smile of circus clowns of yore, he'd make one of the saddest clowns I’ve ever seen. And yet…and yet…there is something intriguingly playful about this face.

His hair is short – a close-cropped afterthought the color of wheat on an overcast day. He's only 43, but his hairline is profoundly receding - the disappearance and thinning fit more for of a man ten years his senior. A myriad of lines are etched deeply into his forehead and down into his furrowed brow, as if his face were clay and someone had dragged all his years straight through. Hell yes, there's character in his face in spades, but again, these deep trench marks create the aura of a man far older than his 40 plus years; far older, far sadder and far more worried than he probably is.

His mouth is rather small, his lips a bit thin, even his smile melancholy. He isn't handsome in a conventional manner; hell, he's pasty and slight – a boyo from the Old Country who’d made his fortune steadily, over the years, using what he’d learned from the lads and bums of Dorchester and its environs. Sometimes he grew a goatee – or the hint of one I guess. Almost looked like it took him half a year just to do that. It made him look a bit devilish. He has it in spades – the boyish face, the sad eyes, the furrowed brow and a face far too old for its time.

He'd captured me, unawares, and completely, but how?