The man was crying at the feet of a twenty feet tall statue of a man he didn’t know. The wind was blowing from the east and the west was all but quiet. The noise of the city kept silence away for that moment. Despite the ruckus every tear drop and every sob could be heard on ever inch of that plaza. The tourist watch bewildered and the natives notice the man from the corner of their eye but no one does anything about it. Who knows what this man might have? Maybe he killed a man… Maybe he killed a woman… or maybe child… who knows? But some say who cares? He can cry all he wants and that statue won’t come alive. As the people pass by the plaza the man weeps and in a moment of desperation the man screams. “Why you fucking bastards, why do you do this to me?” The people around him stop for just a second to acknowledge his presence, his strange presence, and then move on, now a bit faster than before.

A kid breaks away from her mother and looks at the man directly in the eyes. Then as the mother runs to grab him, he notices the man crying, is the man portrayed in the statue. For that moment the kid knew his secret and the man blinks at him. The mother apologizes and takes the now enlightened boy away from the crazed maniac crying on the feet of a twenty foot statue of himself. The child is slowly leaving the plaza on his mother’s arms and when he looks back the man was gone. No more crying, no more yelling but certainly a whole lot of questions that when the kid grows up to be a man he’ll be asking himself. Did Christopher Columbus really want a statue full of pigeon crap?