Day Two of our mutual observation of the Sisyphean Sand Sweeper, who emerges cinematically from the sea mist.
There he is, far right on the boardwalk, having brushed his bit of silt beachward… He grasps his broom in his right hand as he boards his bicycle … “Does he just do this one opening,” asks Mr UD as we watch him wobble off, “or does he do a line of them?”
He disappears into the haze.
And ol’ UD instantly thought of Don DeLillo’s story, “Midnight in Dostoevsky,” which, as the title suggests, evokes a darker than dark, zero-visibility world, and places in it an intriguing person who emerges from the cloud of unknowing; it then adds two observers who, day after day, discuss among themselves this human apparition. In the story, it’s a rather shabby old man in a snowy empty upstate NY town who every day takes a solitary walk in the snow; here, in our fashionable Delaware beach town, it’s a thready old guy who appears every morning to accomplish obscure self-appointed rounds.