Smoking Music

There's a broken cinder block just outside the door if you go through the warehouse of the office and at least 5 times during the day I'll go and balance myself on it and smoke cigarettes.  There's a man who works at the company we share the building with, who has long hair and wears sandals and blue jeans.  He sits in the back of his red Ford pickup truck and plays the same twang-y tune on a fiddle every day.  Our timing is nearly perfect - when I'm smoking, he's playing, when he's playing, I'm smoking.  I watch him with some sort of fascination but I look away and blush when I see him turn his head to look in my direction.  I become overwhelmed with guilt, as if I'm watching some private affair, something I shouldn't be gawking at.  It's not that the music is beautiful (or even in tune most days), or that the man himself is attractive, it's more that there's a man in this cold-concrete-corporate parking lot and he's playing the fiddle and wearing brown sandals in the back of a red truck.

We've never spoken and probably never will.  When the winter gets here, just like last winter, I won't see him at all.  And then at the first sign of spring, when the snow finally melts from both the bed of his truck and the top of my cinder block, we'll return to our spots and he'll provide the smoking music and I'll provide the attentive audience.  It's kind of this thing we have.