Crazy people walk here. Not dangerous-crazy, though some are clearly off their meds. More like bizarre-crazy. I looked up “bizarre.” My dictionary says it comes from the Basque “bizar,” for “beard.”

I live in Berkeley. I was born and raised here, and now I attend Cal. We call “here” the open ward.

We have Barking Man. He’s got some sort of palsy and he seems to walk for therapy. He also barks. He knows where the dogs live. He tries to provoke them by calling their names and barking when he passes. He usually succeeds. The surprise is when I see him drive by in his Mercedes coupe. I wonder if he bought it with settlement funds from some accident that crippled him.

There’s Praying Woman. She wanders the streets with a vacant look on her face. She kneels and genuflects on the sidewalk of most street corners.

Friendly Guy always wears a red crash helmet. I’ve never seen him fall or even wobble, but he’s padded as if he’s had some concussions. He likes to say hi to everyone.

Purple Woman is so color-coordinated that even the tennis balls that pad the rear legs of her walker are lavender.

But the true bizarre, the Bearded One, is Ty. He walks with a bird on his shoulder, and he refers to himself as a Scalawag. He doesn’t have a pegleg, but he’s blind.

“Arg” is what Ty often says. I’ve heard him refer to cops as Scurvy Rats. But privately he’s told me that rats don’t get scurvy. Only people and guinea pigs and monkeys lack the ability to synthesize C for themselves.

I started to know Ty a year ago. I was walking a lot then, at night. It made my mother uncomfortable, but I was too restless at home. I kept passing Ty. It doesn’t matter to him whether it’s day or night when he wants to walk.

One of the things about growing up in Berkeley is how accustomed you get to disabled people. The Cal campus was the first accessible one in the country, and the Bay Area is a good place to live. Most of the disabled students who come here stay. So from an early age, we’re used to seeing chair-riders and blind folks and silent groups with vivacious hands.

I was entering my “evolved” phase. That’s when I started to make a point of politeness. I tried to be gentle in voice and body language. When I caught myself with my arms crossed in front of my chest I’d turn it into a self-hug. I tried to notice. Nodded or said hi to everyone I passed. Acknowledged them and tried to be acknowledged. So I said hello to Ty.

It took a few times before he talked to me. At first he may have been too surprised to speak. I don’t think blind people in general or Ty in particular are often greeted by passers. But after a little he was hi-ing back at me, or evenin’-ing, and soon we progressed to conversing in short sentences.

It got to where I saw him often. He knew my step the way a dog knows a car engine. Within a month we sometimes walked together.

Like I said, Ty wears a bird on his shoulder. You’d expect it to be a parrot in keeping with the pirate theme, but the birds are not his pets. He insists he doesn’t own them. They’re locals.

Most days he wears a pigeon. On occasion it’s a seagull. And rarely during the days but quite often at night, a crow rides next to his left ear. I know there’s more than one pigeon. I never get close enough to the others to be sure.

(continued on Wednesday)