54. Privacy

It was August, when the climate doesn’t support civilized life in our part of the world. It is a good time to avoid contact with strangers and any sort of extended arguments. Walking is best done as early as possible in the morning.


So, daylight found me circling our downtown park, thinking about lost loves and missed opportunities. The park was deserted, that is until a figure emerged from a walking path and filed in a dozen or so feet behind me.

It was a well-rounded female dressed in spandex pants and a white t-shirt, both several sizes too small. I chose to ignore her and resumed my thoughts until she closed the gap and began speaking in a voice that pierced the morning peace like a flying shard of glass.

“By God you’d better not start that stuff up with me again.”

I looked and saw that she had an “ear-bud” attached and was undoubtedly carrying on a phone conversation. I continued walking.

“That’s what I told him,” she said. “He just acted like I was one of them two-bit whores he hangs out with.”

I walked faster, hoping to distance myself from the telephone talker. No luck—she sped up as well, even sounding closer that before.

“Then he come across that bed and started tryin’ to make up with me.”

She was quiet momentarily as the person on the other end said something. I took the opportunity to turn right in another attempt to escape.

“Hell, no,” she resumed as she followed me. “I told him he wadn’t gettin’ nothin’ off me as long as he kept actin’ the way he’d been doin’”

I went into a very slow jog, actually more of a waddle, hoping to gain some distance. It worked for a few minutes before I heard her gaining on me.

“Well, hell I had to go to the Doctor that morning and take a stool sample. I’m here to tell you it was stinkin’ like hell before I got there. I finally got in around ten-thirty and he put me up on that table … “

I had heard enough. Luckily, I was passing a bench and managed ease onto it so she could pass on by and take her conversation with her.

Unbelievably, she sat down beside me and started up again.

“Then I caught Betty Lou and her boyfriend in her bedroom when I got back and he had his hand just about …”

I jumped up again and started off. “Hey big dope,” she said. “Where do you think you’re going?”

I turned around and stared. “C.W. have you gone completely mad?”

“What?”

“Are you trying to be a total idiot?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean with this telephone crap?”

“Don’t you enjoy listening to it?”

“Not particularly. It’s disgusting.”

“Hell, that was tame compared to what I hear on a daily basis,” he stopped and spoke into the earpiece. “I’ll call you back later.” Then he turned to me. “Is there no conversation you people won’t share publicly?”

“Sometimes I think not.”

“Weird,” he said, as he folded the phone and stared into space.

53. Running Away

We were experiencing the “Dog Days of Summer” and I was going for a walk but not venturing far from the condominium. I stopped to watch the construction at the park across Ninth Street when a young boy of five or six years of age walked up to me. Assuming he was from the church school next door, I ignored him until he spoke.


“Mr. can you help me?”

I looked around. It is no longer safe for a grown man to talk publicly to a child he doesn’t know.

“Please,” he said.

“What do you need?”

“I’m running away from home.”

Then I noticed he was carrying a grocery bag filled, I assumed, with his traveling gear. I became suspicious but decided to play along.

“And why are you running away?”

“I’m tired,” he said. “I need some rest.”

“Tired?”

“Yes, Mama has me in two baseball leagues, a soccer league, swimming lessons, and a dance class.”

“All of that?”

It’s worse,” he said. “Now she wants to make me go to Vacation Bible School.”

“I see.”

“She calls it VBS but I know what it is.”

Continuing to play along, I said, “So you think your days are getting pretty full?”

“I’m so tired of doin’ stuff that I can’t sleep,” he said. “And besides …”

“Besides what?”

“My friend Tommy told me about a neat game you can play without any adults around at all.”

“Really?”

“Yes, it’s called ‘Space Fighters’ and you pretend that you and your friends are

Starship Troopers. All you need is some cardboard boxes and somewhere to play pretend.”

“You don’t say.”

“Yep. Don’t that sound like fun?”

“Indeed,” I said. “And where are you going to play this game?”

“In a place called the ‘One Hundred Acre Wood.”

“Sounds like a fun place to me.”

“And I could rest when we weren’t busy playing.”

“You mean take a nap or something?”

“Heck no,” he said. “I could read a book or something,” he thought for a moment and added, “Have you ever laid on your back and watched the clouds?”

“Once or twice.”

“I try to do that sometimes at baseball practice,” he said. “But the last time I did I got hit in the head by a fly ball.”

He paused and looked at me with this most wistful look. “Then they was going to kick me off the team but my mother and the coach got into an awful fight and they said I could stay on if I paid attention.”

“C.W.,” I said finally. “I get the picture.”

“What?” he said.

“Come on …” I started but just then a car screeched to a halt and a woman jumped out. She gave me a withering look and pushed the screaming child into the back seat. The car sped away.

“Suffer the little children,” a voice said. I turned and realized a priest from the school had been watching the whole affair.

“I was just standing here, Father,” I explained as I turned back toward the condo.

As I did, I heard him say to my back. “You are a most amazing species.”

Victory Over Drugs

Sometimes C.W. tones down his appearance and this was one of those days. He asked me to meet him at a coffee shop in our local library complex.


Arriving, I recognized him straight away. He appeared as … how will I describe him? Well, “Grandpa Walton” would fit as well as anything.

He sat at one of the large tables with newspapers spread in front of him and a large coffee in his hand. He peeked over the top of a pair of reading glasses and motioned for me to sit.

“They don’t have real cups in here,” he said. “They serve coffee in these paper-sorta things.”

“You don’t find real cups much anymore,” I said. It’s best to agree with him just wait for the conversation to unravel. Patrons were stirring about in the shop, some studying the bookshelves lining the area. No one paid us any mind, a fact with probably says more about library patrons than it does about the species in general.

“Says here,” he began. “Let’s see, where is it?” He stirred the stack of newspapers, looking for a specific item. I waited.

“Ah, here it is,” he said, pulling the selection in front of him as he adjusted his spectacles. Then he took a sip of coffee.

“This is one of those “bits from yesteryear” columns—from a county newspaper out in West Virginia. “Says here from 40 years ago,” he looked at me and repeated, “Forty years ago.” The he resumed, “ ‘… the County Sheriff’s department destroyed a ten-acre field of marijuana plants this past Saturday and arrested the owner as it continues the war against drugs in America.’”

He looked at me over his spectacles as if I had been the owner of said crop. I knew how a suspect in a murder case must feel when he takes the witness stand. He sipped his coffee.

After several seconds he spoke. “Forty years, eh?”

“What?”

“Been waging this so-called ‘war on drugs’ for 40 years?”

“Probably longer than that.”

“And?”

“And what?”

“Has your species been victorious?”

“Uh, no.”

“Nearly so?”

“Not quite.”

“How about a status report then? He said. “How are we doing … drugs pretty near defeated? Have they requested a truce to talk peace?”

“Not exactly.”

“What, exactly?”

“It gets more hopeless and costly each day.”

He fumbled among the papers again and slid out a handwritten note. “Here’s something,” he said. “This man of your species, Clausewitz, says that war is an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.”

“I’m sure he said that.”

“So are you compelling ‘drugs’ to your will?”

“I’m afraid it’s the other way around.”

“Still burning crops and arresting people after all these years?”

“Constantly.”

He scattered papers around and produced another note. “Here’s one more,” he said. “Can’t find the exact author but it is widely quoted.”

“Let’s hear it,” I said.

“The definition of ‘insanity’ is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

“Far out, man,” I said.

The Return

People had been asking so I left a message that I needed to see the Alien. No, it wasn’t like a plea in some science fiction movie. It was more like an ad in the paper but he showed up as Michael Rennie anyway. Same old C.W., cute as usual.


“You called? he said after I opened the apartment door and registered my surprise.

I ushered him in and motioned for him to have a seat. “People have been asking about you.”

“I’m flattered,” he said. “What did you tell them?”

“That you had been recalled because of that incident with the high-school girl.”

“That was blown all out of proportion,” he said. “Besides, that’s what star football players are supposed to do, isn’t it?”

“Pretty much.”

“That’s what I thought,” he said. “So … no, that wasn’t it at all.”

“Then where have you been?”

“Making a detailed interim report.”

“To the Falloonian Elders?”

“Yes.”

“So?”

“So what?”

So how are we doing?”

“Not too good.”

“Then … are the Fallootians getting ready to wipe us out like in your movie.”

“No. You’re doing a fine job of that yourselves.”

He had me there. I had never seen him more somber. But heck, he was Michael Rennie after all. “So how much time?”

“I don’t think your species would be so obsessed about time if your planet didn’t circle your home star with such precision.”

“Say what?”

“What makes you think things occur sequentially?”

“Uh, gee, don’t they?”

“Why couldn’t they all be occurring at once and your mental state is simply drawn to whatever is shiniest?”

“Is that what happens?”

“Let’s just say for the moment that your species’ consciousness paradigm is closer to that of a blackbird than to a logician. You won’t be able to proceed further with this inquiry as long as you linger on such things as rock stars and inconsequential politicians.”

“Like Michelle Bachman?”

“Precisely, now why don’t we go for a walk and you can convince me that your species would warrant existence?”

“Sure,” I said, grabbing a hat to protect me from the sun.

A while later we stood at my city’s statue of Harriet Tubman leading a child-slave to freedom.

“Better?” I said.

He studied the amazing sculpture, and then turned to me. “She was a great person, wasn’t she?”

“One of the greatest.”

“Indeed. I’ll maybe stick around awhile,” said he

"Don’t you mean you are here, have been here, will be here?” Now I was trying to be cute.

"Klaatu barada nikto," he said.

50. Reality

We hadn’t had much good weather recently so, during one of the rare pleasant interludes I walked to my favorite spot in the park. It was spring and threatening to rain again, so I kept a weather-eye out for clouds. That’s why I didn’t notice someone sitting beside me until I smelled a mixture of body odor and cheap cigar smoke that snapped my head around.

There beside me was a figure as sad as I had seen beyond the movies. He was balding and badly in need of a shave. He was dressed in work pants and a sleeveless undershirt with a large mop of gray-black hair protruding from the top of it. His stomach spilled over his waist like dough overflowing in an oven.

I didn’t have to guess.

“C.W.,” I said. “What the hell are you up to?”

“What business is it of yours?” he said.

“None,” I said. “You are absolutely right. None at all.” I turned to watch the river, now at flood crest.

“If you must know,” he said. “I am waiting for a date.”

“A date?”

“A date. Is that so unbelievable?”

“Well,” I struggled for politeness and chose honesty instead. “Who would date you looking like that?”

“You would be surprised,” he said. “Some women look at the ‘inner-man’ and beyond superficial appearances.”

I nodded and turned back to the river as my lunch began to roil.

“I just may have found a soul-mate,” he said, brushing some cigar ashes off his stomach.’

“A soul-mate.”

“Yes, a soul-mate.”

And how did you happen to find this soul-mate?”

“On the internet,” he said. “They have sites where you can find a date.”

“You matched a date on the internet?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” I said. “But didn’t you have to submit a photo?”

“The Falloonian Elders don’t allow me to publicize my own photo,” he said. “So I used one of yours.”

Now he had my attention. “You used my photo?”

“Yep,” he said. “And it took a long time, as you could imagine, but I finally got a hit.”

“And what was the attraction?”

As close as I could get to reality

“This, he said reaching into a pants pocket and retrieving a soiled paper containing print. He handed it to me and I read.

“Attractive SWF wants man who is comfortable within himself, loves casual dress and good food, and isn’t hung up on physical appearances—who loves to share a smoke and then take long, romantic walks in the spring rain.”

“Don’t I look the part?” he asked.

I was already up and moving away.

“Don’t you want to see her happy face when she meets me?”

He yelled something else but I was already out of hearing range.