Staring out my window, the bricks have all come down. What was once an old house across the street is now a heap of bricks and charred wood. 

The place had been a halfway house that’s now all the way gone. 

So are the residents, all gone for quite some time. 

The fire has been at least a couple of years ago … maybe. Measuring time and the memory of time is a murky business at best but even more so during the past year. The past year feels like it has never happened, like no time has passed at all, while seeming as if it’s the same day that’s stretched into a decade.

So, the house is gone. The residents were gone even before the fire, or so it seems. All based on the memory of looking out the window. No research. No pulling old stories, or records, or calling a source, or phoning a friend.

Just memory. Just recollections in the tide of one’s mind, things that come and go, both fresh and old, as accessible as a minute ago or 50 years ago  – all the same difference to the clarity or confusion of memories.

Memory recalls the smoking man. A resident of the house. He had a name. But memory does what memory does. A fickle thing. It erases as much, if not more, than it recalls. 

The man’s face, his gait, the way he held his head, the way his cigarette made a sweeping arc from the walking stride of his arm lowered to his mouth to inhale then back again, the bend of his shoulders as he watched the sidewalk below him, the cut of his hair, the bristle of his mustache, the slow decay of his jacket from new to old to dingy, the cast of his shadow depending on the sun’s angle at morning or noon or evening or the color of his skin or clothes depending on the brightness of the sun or the depth of the overcast skies, the passing resemblance to Mark Twain, the steady cadence of the smoking man pacing back and forth on the same stretch of sidewalk, the toll the passing years take on him day after day, step after step, cigarette after cigarette, but slight, subtle,  new wrinkles faint then etched, a strand of white hair against mostly dark then grey and greyer, the same man, smoked to ash with the passing of time … though memory sees all from the hazy first sight through the indistinguishable last look.

All of this and more but his name, his name, is lost, heard once maybe twice, but gone. 

Still, the image seen so many times is etched in memory even though the smoking man is no longer outside the window. And the house where he lived is reduced past even ruins to only damaged materials. And other coworkers never even noticed the smoking man; they have no memory of him to recall. Even though he was there and they were here.

And he hasn’t crossed my mind in months or maybe years. He was not a relative or a friend, or even an acquaintance. Not even a conversation. A person, a living soul, but a part of the landscape, a moving part of the world outside an office window, as real but as unknown as a breeze slipping through the leaves of a tree.

Then, looking out the window, the memory of the smoking man returns simply because, in looking at the rubble, the realization strikes that some part of the street’s rhythm is missing. While cars drive by and other people walk past, the scene is like looking at a retouched photograph, a stage waiting for a player who is not there.

A man forgotten has been recalled.

The smoking man. 

Where did he go? Where is he now? Where could he be?

What happened to the smoking man when his world went up in smoke?

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times.