He sat thumbing absent-mindedly through the Life and Leisure section of the weekly paper, not so much reading headlines as he was pondering life and leisure itself. The black and grey print suddenly felt like a dusty attic to his mind, a cluttered place he’d rather ignore. Staring at the remains of his everything bagel, the same bagel he has every Tuesday at Sam’s Deli at the same outdoor table with the same stale coffee he long ago learned to tolerate, he felt oddly out of place. He threaded his fingers through his thinning white hair, sighed and then stood with wobbly urgency that made a woman nearby nearly lose her croissant to the gravely sidewalk below. He removed his thick-lensed glasses, carefully observing them closely, and after a moment snapped them at the hinges and at the bridge, dropped them onto the newspaper beside half of a tip stuffed under his plate and walked away, for he discovered in that moment that he had grown tired of detail and would prefer to see things with his own vision, blurry as it may be, as if each scene was meant to be viewed as an impressionist painting.
Sometimes he misses the clarity, but most days not; he has grown progressively more ignorant of the world around him, but never ceases to see its beauty. And he has never felt more content.
