The Coldest Guy In Wallingford

There's a really old Filipino guy who lives up the street from us that takes our bus to a food bank downtown in the morning. His English sucks, which would be more of a problem if he ever wanted to talk about anything outside of his three favorite topics: the nationality of everyone on the street, genocide and Hitler. He loves talking about Hitler. He once even greeted us at a crowded bus stop in the morning with a heil Hitler hand salute, complete with a heel click and everything. Our attempts to explain how uncool that was were kind of lost in translation, though, and we ended up just ignoring him for weeks. On the way downtown he occupies himself with folding bus schedules into origami cranes and handing them to people, mostly to all the young women who are sitting nearby, which they love, of course, and which kind of pisses us off. Whatever, old guy, they love the cranes. Why don't you show them the heil Hitler?

Yesterday was the first time we'd seen him in a while so we asked how he'd been and how he'd been keeping warm. After living on the same street with this man for a couple years we still can't confirm that he lives in the boarded up front porch of a house up the way, but it seems likely. How've you been keeping warm? We didn't really expect an answer that didn't involve how many Poles were killed by the Nazis during WWII or how cold it was for the Poles who were killed by the Russians in Siberia in the years following, so it was surprising when he not only acknowledged the question, but actually introduced a new ethnic group into our conversation. The Eskimos, he said, ate fats and oils to stay warm, and they lived in igloos. They ate fats and oils from whales and seals, he explained.

A week ago we sang Christmas carols while we watched the snow fall outside the window, and we kept warm by cranking the thermostat up to 68 and stacking Duraflames in the fireplace. Our 80-year-old Filipino neighbor was spooning Crisco into his mouth and putting on both of his over-sized coats. In Chicago, where we come from, when it gets really cold or really hot the papers make a big deal of reminding people to check on their neighbors, particularly the elderly who may be on a fixed income. People do it, too - They go and look in on the old lady in 1B to make sure that she's not sealed in the kitchen with the oven door open, because when it gets really cold old people drop like flies over there. Our neighbor is the kind of isolated old guy of limited means who'd be a likely tick in that death toll. It wasn't that cold here. There's a difference between 19 and -19, but we should have checked in on the Filipino guy. Maybe brought him a blanket and a bottle of extra virgin and listened to how many Jews the Poles killed in the '40s. Maybe get another paper crane to bring home. Put it with the others.

Image courtesy of Flickr user clern.