Maximilian is Diogenes?

This will be my first "crossover" entry. The crossover is to my other blog, the one dedicated to my father, "Legacy of a Courtly Curmudgeon". http://djinnfromthebronx.blogspot.com/

The precipitating story is my encounter with a homeless man. I did not realize initially that he was homeless.

I decided about 1 this afternoon that I wanted to run a garage sale with a few items I have been putting in a pile for just such an impulse. I put out a table to house some collected, but mostly unused mugs, and DVD's, some really good films, but not ones that I have tended to watch a second or third time, a bunch of books, some of them from the psychology book clubs that I always kept even when I could have sent them back cause I really did not want them (I'd always think, well, maybe it'll have some use for me, but they never did). I put out a tiny color television I used to keep in my kitchen. A not inexpensive print from Cost Plus (over 100.00, and that's a lot for a garage sale) that used to hang in my dad's apartment, but isn't something I think I'll use anywhere for me. I really wasn't looking to make a buck, and quitely literally, in the three hours I was out there, with little foot traffic, I only made about three fifty selling a few DVD's and a cap. I always feel a little guilty running such sales, cause I am either going to give away the stuff ultimately or leave it out there for someone to pick up. But I figured, some of this stuff is useful, so why not.

A man who clearly had been at the local thrift shop judging by the plastic bags that encased his purchases, wearing a baseball cap, a nice, though open black filipino style shirt and khaki pants and a gray wild beard came up and scanned the various books.

Yes? No? Will he? Won't he? He did. He picked two, one "The Uses of Enchantment" by the late suicided Bruno Bettleheim and another on Asperger's Syndrome, an autism spectrum condition.

He asked "how much". I said "Fifty Cents for both". "Really?"  "Yeah, I am not trying  to make money on this stuff."  And by now I had realized he wasn't flush anyway, since he pulled his coins out of a tight plastic bag. I liked something about him too. Couldn't put my finger on it.

"People say that I have Asperger's" he pointed at the book. And we were, or rather, he was, off. It's always hard to know what to believe when anyone speaks about their lives, let alone a man who acknowledged he was a street person, by choice. But he was surely smart, and listening him talk about radiation beams and sun spots (yes, he got there somehow), and his book that only sold in Germany and Iceland, "Life Liberty and the Pursuit of Roadkill", I found myself fascinated, although it surely looked as if he were content to stay with me for hours. He was born in Germany, speaks several languages, had taught but found his life long resistance to authority made it easier for him to live the life he was. He goes to libraries. He hangs out in Starbucks. I said, "You seem happy". He said he was.

I believed him. His real name, he said, was Maximillian, but he calls himself, to others, "Miles Smith."

I suggested that he write about the various things he shared with me. I told him that if I saw him in Starbuck's I'd say, "Hi Maximillain" and I'd hope he'd remember me.

It occured to me after we parted that maybe I had met the man that my father, in his writings, dubbed "Diogenes", an intelligent, articulate homeless man that he wrote truth about and used for his fictional process as well. Somewhere I have pictures of that man, in my, in dad's stuff, if I haven't misplaced them.  Or thrown them away.

We cannot know what is behind the face of anyone, homeless or wealthy or smiling.

There was much behind the face of Maximillian, story upon story that led to our meeting on the stoop of my LA apartment. I felt lucky to have met him somehow and luckier still that I had not disregarded him as I otherwise might have.

So maybe now you'll go to my other blog and read a story my father wrote regarding one of his talks with his homeless man, maybe the same one.

But for all practical purposes herein, Maximillian and Diogenes, they are one.