The man with the gray satchel is never on time. Often he runs late and we can see him jogging frantically down the road, bag jerking violently off his back. He may be early from time to time as well, but those days are undoubtedly rare. He appears every day though, heavy clad in a ski jacket carpenters jeans. Sometimes he wears a stocking cap but today he didn’t.

His name is David and he hawks the Chicago Sun-Times for ten hours a day on the corner of Pulaski and Peterson. Thin and graying with a perfect goatee, he looks a little like Henry Louis Gates Junior sans the thousand-dollar suite. I told him that once he looked at me like I’d just told him he resembled like Henry Louis Gates Junior.

“Is he good-looking,” he asked?

“I guess,” I replied. “But they don’t usually print his hedcut in the Wall Street Journal.”

“Well that’s not Sun-Times. Buy the Sun-Times, man. Only fifty-cents”

I don’t often buy from David because, well, since columnist Deborah Pickett got married, there’s been very little need to continue picking it up. If there’s no chance I can use her column to score points via e-mail, then there’s just no reason to waste half a buck on such a second-rate newspaper. I stopped watching Rachel Ray for the very same reason.

Still, I’m one for consistency, for guarantees no matter how untenable, so when David told me that today might be his last day, I was crushed. He’d found a better job, one that did not require him to spend hours enduring the cold Midwestern winter, and for that I was pleased. Conditions have taken a toll on him and he looks well older than his forty-two years. Still, a leak had sprung from the vessel of my life leaving me spinning just slightly off target.

I shook his hand. “Good luck to you, sir. I really will miss you.”

He thanked me, nodded and grabbed his satchel. It was only 4 p.m. and his shift was far from over.