I Write: The Umbrella Man

At our monthly Writing is Fun meetings we decide a prompt for writing for the next meeting. 

The prompt for October 2025 was Broken Things.

The Umbrella Man

He came around our small mill town neighborhood riding on an old bicycle, the large black seat worn through at the back to the yellow lining. On the front was a large basket filled with tools of one sort or another and on the back was a shelf that reached out over the back fender. Hanging from both sides of the shelf were two bulky leather saddlebags with large buckles. And on the shelf was a tall metal basket filled with a variety of things – maybe a jar of miscellaneoeus keys, a roll of rubber strips, a bundle of metal rods and wooden dowels, or some unidentifiable object.

It was Carl, the umbrella man, a tinker by another name. His claim to fame was fixing broken umbrellas but he fixed a lot of other things, too.

It seemed that whenever he was around for the week, boxes of broken things would appear on doorsteps or at the end of a sidewalk.

Carl could be found sitting on the ground, cross-legged, fiddling with things from a box. You could see him rifling through the objects in his baskets, grabbing a screwdriver, or disappearing on his bike to bring back something that would let him fix whatever he was working on.

Whether is was a repaired doll chair, a restrung bow, or a small tin construction crane, he would leave it on the door step and not ask for payment.

Often we would see a neighbor running after him to offer payment and he did not refuse the offering.