November 21, 2007--Thanksgiving Story: The Timekeeper--Part One

For years I’ve noticed him. In all weather. Always wearing his blue checked short-sleeve shirt. It gets bitterly cold at the eastern edge of Washington Square Park, but still I’ve never seen him with a jacket, much less a coat or a hat or wearing gloves.

He’s easy to ignore. Just another of the big city’s lost souls. Because lost, he seems--muttering to himself as he paces with apparent purpose back and forth, back and forth--he seems sometimes to rise in what appears to be anger. Sad for me, I know a little about people afflicted with Tourette Syndrome, and since I first observed him thought he was a classic case. Like the others--unable to control his violent verbal eruptions; and though he, unlike them, is not easy to understand, I assumed that his angry outbursts included the cursing that is characteristic of so many Tourettes. Indeed, a textbook case of physical and verbal tics.

Although I know that there is nothing inherently to fear from Tourettes, as I said they are familiar to me, I always cut them and him a wide swath. One truly never knows.


That is until last Wednesday.

I had heard that he is well-known to the NYU community. In fact, there was a recent article about him in the student newspaper, The Washington Square News. No one attempted to interview him, the reporter had been respectful of his affliction, but he did learn that the little man—and he is indeed quite small, no more than five feet tall—is referred to as the Timekeeper by students who race to and from class along Washington Square East. This because he appears to check his oversized watch every thirty seconds or so. And each time, after doing that, he barks what seem like commands or admonitions to the students streaming along the park. Thus it was reported. Nothing much more than that. There was nothing said about his condition or other aspects of his like. Such as it is. And, oh yes, they did write how a number of the students interviewed for the article, like me, also noticed that he never wears a sweater when the wind is howling, and a few revealed that they had brought one for him last winter but he had rejected it with a dismissive and even frightening grunt.

Last Wednesday was especially raw for mid-November. One of those late fall days, when after a spell of warmer-than-normal temperatures, the color of the sky suggests that if it were just a few degrees colder it would yield some early winter snow. It was of course no surprise that the Timekeeper was there, perhaps pacing a bit faster to keep warm, as usual checking his watch in the familiar exaggerated gesture which reveals him deliberately lifting inch-by-inch his stumpy but muscular left arm and watch to within a foot of his face. As if to flamboyantly show anyone who cared, or happened to notice, that he was on the job and would indeed still be at his post when things really began to blow and storm. We could count on that. Though what that counting-on might mean remained unclear.

But for some reason, unlike on so many other days, I paused to watch him as he went through his involuntary ritual. More balletic than a series of, to me, familiar neurological tics. And thus worth observing.

To be continued tomorrow . . .