Dedication

Many years ago (over a half-century now) in the town of Papeete on the island of Tahiti, there lived a man who managed to survive by constantly scavenging garbage cans and piles of refuse and street gutters. His features were asian, but no one seemed to know where he had been born, where he had come from. No one knew his true name. He rarely spoke, and then only to himself. He concentrated entirely on his work, his face locked in a grimace.

   One day four young boys, began following him, keeping their distance, but never letting him out of their sight. Soon they began making fun of him and what he did, joking that he probably ate the garbage and all kinds of other horrible tasting stuff, and how stupid he was for doing that. They said these things often, not caring if he heard them because they knew he couldn’t understand them. They named him Chik Chak, yelling it at him as if he were a dog to be trained to recognize it. Sometimes they chanted it as they followed him, and once in awhile he stared back over a shoulder at them and anger distorted his face. Off and on for months they shadowed him.

   Then one day they left the island, never to return. They rarely spoke of the man and what they had done to him, and when they did it was only another memory from their childhoods, nothing special.

I was one of those boys.

I will continue to ask his forgiveness for the rest of my life. The Legions In the Mud posts are dedicated to him, to all those held in slums and pits and dumps, ridiculed and forgotten.