Something new entered the heart of a 55-year-old man.

J had been alone in the world for twenty-five years. He had never been a father, lover, spouse, or friend. In prison, he was bitter, gloomy, celibate, ignorant, and solitary. The ex-convict’s heart was nonetheless full of virginal innocence.

His sister and her children had left him only a vague and far-off memory that gradually disappeared; he made every effort to locate them and, having failed, forgot them. Such is human nature. Other tender emotions of his youth, if he had any, had fallen away.

J promised a dying woman to find her eight-year-old girl who was hostage to an abusive couple. When he rescued and took charge of the little one, he felt stirred to the depth of his being.

Whatever affection within him came alive, and was directed towards the child. He approached the bed where she slept and trembled with the joy of a mother with her new born.

I will tell you who this man is, but first, I want to address his loneliness. It is not uncommon.

I have met such men. Some have themselves been abused, others neglected. A few received little parental guidance and grew up clueless. Usually, they had difficulty making friends and often endured being singled out and bullied. They never found the gift of making social contact and lacked the confidence to approach anyone attractive to them.

Family and relatives may be their most reliable and closest contacts. They tend to live with or near their kinfolk for much of their lives. Perhaps they make a decent living but remain in the shadows.

All of us have walked past them without noticing. They don’t cause trouble. Indeed, such males have mastered the art of invisibility and the rest of us the trick of recognizing an untroubling slice of what the world offers us, but nothing more.

It is worth wondering what they do during the holidays. Occupying themselves with themselves, I imagine. Unless, like J, they have the good luck of discovering a friend or neighbor’s kindness — or becoming a loving uncle or unexpected guardian to a young person.

There is a door to ending loneliness. I’ve known a few like J, the gentleman described above, who waited for another to open it.

Sometimes, one does well serving as a doorman.

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The little girl in the story above is Cosette. The man is called Jean Valjean. They are characters in Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables.

The photos are sourced from Wikimedia Commons. Both are pictures of fathers and daughters. The first is the work of Caroline Hernandez, while Reinhard Breitenstein photographed the second.