Discovery

I was walking in the park on the wooded paths on one of those very blue days last week. Way out past the abandoned restrooms, locked and overgrown. On to one of the lesser used trails not teeming with runners and dog walkers, quiet, just trees, birds, and an occasional unseen rustling in the undergrowth.

At first I thought it was a statue, obscured by branches in a small ravine. Large and craggy in the form a rhinoceros. Then a gust of wind rippled the leaves and one of of the eyes blinked, slowly turned to look at me and, unimpressed, back to the foliage at hand.

Rhinoceros!

I had thought I was alone on the trail but as I looked around in shock I saw a blue tarp and an old man just a few feet away off of the trail. He was sitting on a log and almost blended in to the woods in his tattered brown jacket and greenish-gray trousers. He was what one might classify as a "bum". Two brown beady eyes looked at me from under a squishy battered hat. He winked, almost imperceptibly and then turned and disappeared behind the tarp, somewhere into the woods.

The rhinoceros paid me no more heed and I skittered back into the sunlit clearing and back to the populated trails, to the happy dogs, the joggers intent on their cardiovascular rhythms, measured pace.