A ROMANI MAN in LOS FELIZ

A few days ago I was sauntering around Los Feliz at sunset time, listening to Onda Cero radio on my iPod when a man sitting outside a donut store on Franklin and Hillhurst said something to me as I passed by. I had my earphones on so I didn't hear what he said but I stopped, took one of them out and asked him "what was it"? He wanted to know if I am from Brooklyn because I was wearing my brown (Brooklyn) T-shirt. I told him I had lived there. He was an old man with gray hair and dressed in a well-worn suit. His olive face framed two kind and mischievous hazelnut eyes. He asked me where I was from originally and I told him. He said he was Romani, born in Brooklyn. He started telling baseball stories of his beloved Brooklyn–hence his interest–Dodgers and we hit it off. He was well spoken, cultured and keen on talking. I gently refused his offer of a free palm reading (future will happen and I prefer not to be pressured to make all the right decisions or to accept resignedly an allegedly unbending unpleasant destiny) but he went on talking. Clearly he had found a good conversation companion and was happy to forsake his seer instinct for a while. He did inquire a few times if I was a teacher or a doctor, whose look or energy apparently I emanate, but other than that he was mostly interested in talking history and sharing his family and group stories. The afternoon light was beginning to acquire that orange Los Angeles hue and the air was balmy. A woman inside the donut store looked out into the horizon across the glass while her hands played distractedly with a phone; her eyes grazed my face through the glass like a cat's attention, appearing to be there but not really; I was clearly invisible to her. But not to Tomas, the old Romani man. He politely asked me if I had time to hear a story and I said yes. I had some work to do back at home, besides my entire life to sort out, but perhaps this was part of that untangling process, I thought: the situation, the place, the time seemed to beckon me to stay, so I sat down with a smile on my face and prepared to listen. For the next half hour Tomas took me on an endearing trip with an old Romani fable passed down, he said, from generation to generation, a moving fairy tale full of ingenuity and humor that seemed to contain, among the golden elements of traditional tales (kings and princesses, weddings and unconditional love), new moral quandaries and a foresight into the creation myth of the Romani people, or at least of their wandering ways. I am not going to tell the story for Tomas wants to write a book of them (he has more, he said). Indeed he asked me to write them for him, and I may very well do. I'll keep you posted. But what a great way to end my afternoon walk it was.