Thursday’s Chicago Tribune (12/20) carried a story about “one of the least” amongst us. Joe Zeman spent nearly every day sitting on a red fire hydrant in Lincoln Square allowing pigeons to perch on him. “Pigeons on his head. Pigeons on his shoulders and right down to his arms. Pigeons poised on each palm. Pigeons clinging to his chest. Pigeons on his lap. Pigeons on his thighs. Pigeons, of course, on each foot. The pigeons peck and coo, occasionally flutter their wings. Sometimes even scatter. But not the man; the man is motionless. You might mistake him for a statue. Joseph Zeman can sit for hours, barely flinching a muscle…except for those lips.” [Barbara Mahaney; Tribune staff writer]
Hit and killed by a van, Joe was identified only because he carried several laminated news clippings of a story written about him by Barbara Mahaney. Living alone in an attic room, Joe focused on the pigeons. His funds, meager as they were, helped purchase the varied foods he used to keep the pigeons prospering.
Joe’s life was truly uneventful: he had a stroke when only 8 months; grand mal epilepsy from age 14 months till 48 years old. Yet, he told Ms Mahaney that “sitting on the hydrant the most important work he had ever done. “I’m really advertising to the public how easy it is to be good without an attitude; it’s just as easy to show decency as it is hate today.”
No doubt, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, “the world will little note nor long remember..” the life of Joe Zeman. Yet, we should!
Especially should we note and remember Joe as we approach Christmas in 2007. Surrounded almost constantly by articles and stories of the many ways humans are capable of showing hate to each other, it’s tempting to skip over the “miracle of Christmas”. The “miracle” that reminds us of how the Divine elects to communicate with us. Moses – set afloat to be raised in the Pharaoh’s home; Jesus – born in a stable to a marginal fam,ily.
And, Joe Zeman – a man whose life spoke volumes about the only way we can bring peace. Individually. Each person electing, daily, to be good to each other.
Mahaney reported that many compared Joe to St Francis of Assisi and that he kept dozens of St Francis postcards printed with the peacemaker’s prayer:
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where thee is hatred, let me sow love…”
However we celebrate the birth of Jesus this year, take a moment to reflect on Joe Zeman. Truly he might have been “the least amongst us” – but that is exactly the way the Lord of Peace is revealed.
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