A man walks out of the pizza shop. He’s in his mid-forties, wearing a baggy t-shirt and jorts—not in a deliberate, tasteful, Gen-Z type of way, but in the third-generation-hand-me-down, these are the first pants I saw in my drawer when I woke up this morning kind of way. He has a shuffly, waddling gait; in metronomic fashion, the heel of what remains of his right slide exudes a dry, languorous scrape against the sun-drenched cement.
To the modern eye, he is a man neither blessed with a handsome face, nor a half-decent height, nor a respectable sense of fashion. And yet he moves like a triumphant hunter returning to his tribe. For in his arms he cradles a tower of hot pizza boxes, stacked high enough to obscure his chest.
The audacity, I think. What did you do to earn that joyful smile? All you did was walk into that little store, say hi to the nice man at the counter, and tap a small piece of plastic onto a bigger piece of plastic. Were we transported back to hunter-gatherer times, you would have emerged from the hostile forest not with a slain beast hung over your shoulders, but with a basket of freshly-picked berries set on your head. Accidentally poisonous ones at that. The audacity.
He is eager to turn the corner. Eager to lay his haul upon a table and watch the faces of his people light up.
And I think, he too is an imagebearer.
marginalia 