Well It WAS Called a HoJo...

“I’m starting to have feelings about this gal,” I say.

Mary leans over the railing and peers into the dark of a heavy Florida night.  She jerks her chin toward the woman lurching through the parking lot.  That one?   

I nod. 

“What kind of feelings,” she says, straightening.  “Deep-rooted feelings?  Feelings of longing and/or despair?”

Mary’s been a little keyed up since the flight.

“Feelings of nausea and fascination,” I say. 

We watch as the woman, a tall angular female clad in less than a yard of black fabric, walks through the lot.  The five-, maybe six-inch heels she is wearing give her the perplexing, jerky grace of a spider one shot of vodka past sobriety.  Pale and, well, lunar, somehow, she knocks sharply on a door several down and one floor below us. 

The door opens, and she slips through it.

Mary turns to me.  “What are ya thinkin’?”

“It’s not pizzas she’s delivering.”

“A hooker?"  Mary leans over the railing again, cranes her neck toward the door on the ground floor.  "So suspicious,” she says.  She straightens up, holds out a piece of fruit.  “Meth-addict orange?”

I take it.  The woman who had approached us at the convenience store a couple blocks down had had the hood of her jacket stuffed with them.  “Mmm,” I say.  “Meth-addict oranges are the juiciest.”

Mary nods.  “Nothing says Sunshine State like a parking-lot fruit deal."

We sit down, peel our oranges, drop the skins into the ash can outside our room.

"Ima giver 10 minutes."  Said from around a mouth full of orange.

"That's just rude," I say.  I spit out a seed.  "Terms and conditions are a good three minutes alone."

"You know everything," Mary says.

I shrug nonchalantly.  "I read," I say.

We laugh, eat another orange.

"What did we pay for these again?"

"Three bucks."  Mary pops another segment into her mouth, stands up, and leans over the railing again.  "Door opening!"

I stand in time to see her leave.  Mary hands me a piece of orange, and we watch her adjust a strap or two as she heads back to parking lot.

People never look up.

We watch as she walks from one side of the parking lot to the next,  She pulls a phone out, texts something.  She puts her phone in her purse, then disappears behind a parked car.

Mary tugs at my sleeve.  "Is she doing what I think she's doing?"

I shrug, grimace a bit.  But she is.  The woman is peeing behind a parked car.

"We should stay here more often,"I say.

"Both inexpensive and scenic," Mary offers.  She puts a piece of orange peel in her mouth, gives me a grin.  "What-say we find a new place to stay tomorrow?"

After a few moments, the woman stands, adjusts her clothing and checks her phone.  Another quick text, and she walks through the parking lot and toward another door just a few doors from the first one.

And we watch as she knocks again.  

I Think I Recognize that Dune

“We should take a walk down to the beach,” she says.

I look out the window, out to the ocean.  It is 64 degrees out – a good fifty degrees warmer than home – but it is damper, and windier, than this Minneapolitan is accustomed to.  Having packed very light, I have a choice between flip-flops and winter boots.

“Let me grab my boots.”

And so we walk.  We walk and walk.  I have flown to Texas specifically to meet with her:  Shelly, my longtime blog and Facebook friend, is as warm and funny and intelligent as she appears on paper.   

She tells me of Pablo Neruda, of tamales eaten with mustard and $300 chanclas.  I tell her about Michael Chabon and lutefisk and how many layers of clothes you can wear before you can’t bend your limbs.   

She points out broken sand dollars and dead blowfish on the beach and I bend down to inspect them. 

Eventually, we head back to the condo.

And we walk and walk, our faces pink with sea spray. 

“It feels like the complex should be around here somewhere,” she says.

“If it’s not,” I say, “it should be.  I don’t think I’ve walked this far in years.”

We laugh.  Shelly is a weight lifter, a woman with regular exercise and hydration habits, whereas I am a yoga fan with an affinity for home-made fudge. 

We are lost, however, one dune looking pretty much like another.  We choose a boardwalk, then a street, but nothing looks right. 

“Wait here,” she says.  “I’m going to see if I can figure out where we are.”  She heads off down the street, and the next time I turn around, she has turned a corner and is out of sight. 

A grackle lands on the palm tree nearest me.

“Tick-tick-tick-tick wheeeeeeee,” he bellows.

I look up.  “What?”

“Tick-tick-tick-tick wheeeeeeee!”

“Well,” I say, “that’s what you say now.”

A man on a ladder on the building nearest me stops his painting to look down.  I look over in time to see him shaking his head.  Poor lady.

“I hardly know that bird,” I offer.

He says nothing and returns to his work.

“We overshot it!”  Shelly is hustling her way back.  “We overshot by quite a bit!”

“How –“

“I asked some workers,” she says, pointing vaguely from the direction she’s come.  “Four guys came off their ladders to help.”

And so we walk some more.

And 45 minutes later, legs sore and still laughing, we eat lunch without thought to caloric intake.    

Dial M for Random

Ring-ring!  Ring-Ring!

“Good morning, this is Pearl.”

“Who is this?  Where are you?”

I blink at my phone. 

It doesn’t help, but it doesn’t hurt.

“This is Pearl,” I say.  “And where are you?”

“Well I’m – I’m Barbara,” she says crossly.  “And I’m not going to tell you where I am.”

I blink again.  There is a short silence before Barbara continues. 

“Why did you call me?”

I sigh, quietly.  Perhaps this is a test of some kind…

“I believe you called me,” I say.

“Not now,” she snaps.  “This morning.”

Barbara appears to be a bit peevish.

A light bulb goes off.  “Oh,” I say.  “I think I know what you’re talking about.  Is your number similar to –“  and here I rattle off the number I had mis-dialed earlier in the morning.

There is a silence, long enough that I begin to worry about ol’ Babs.

“Barbara?”

“Yes,” she cranks.  “Yes, it is, and you called me at 7:04.  Who calls anyone at 7:04?”

“Oh, I’m so sorry,” I say.  “I start work at 7:00.  I’m sorry if I woke you.”

She sniffs.  “I was up at 5:00.”  I am certain that this woman is frowning.  “I saw that you called but I was out in my garden, and then you didn’t leave a number, and I’ve been worried about it all day!”

“Oh,” I say. 

There is another silence.

“It’s so nice in the morning,” she says.

I close my eyes, then shrug.  Why not.  “Yes,” I say, “but I rarely get a chance to be out in it.”

Barbara cannot contain herself.  “What?!” she says.  “Well, you should!  You should get out.  Today is going to be nice at 4:00!”

This Barbara!  She’s a bit crabby, but she seems okay.  I laugh.  “Why at 4:00?  I don’t get off until –“

And just like that, there is a click and I am listening to the dial tone.

Barbara has hung up on me.

It haunts me, that conversation.

What made her think it was going to be nice at 4:00?

Don’t Think of It as Censorship. Think of It as Feedback.

I used to have 617 friends.

“Surely, Pearl,” you say. “You are exaggerating.  No one has 617 friends.”

 “I used to have 617 friends,” I respond.  “Now I have 616.  And stop calling me Shirley.”

The truth is that Pearl – good ol’ Pearl! – has jumped the greased  -- nay, lubed – tracks of what passes for social discourse and become, in one fell swoop, out of touch. 

“Don’t look now,” writes #616, “but I had boudoir pics taken!”  But she doesn’t give me time to not look now, and suddenly I am thrust – if that’s not too loaded a word – into the soft-focus snapshots of her fantasy life.

Which apparently includes wearing the equivalent of a spool of thread. 

While posing upside down.

And peering from between her naughty, naughty fingers.

There she is, her own centerfold appearance.

On Facebook. 

Look.  I’m all for fantasy.  And I like a good come-hither look as much as the next gal.  But when you’ve posted pics of yourself in a two-piece take-out container holding a pair of chopsticks – is that what that was? – it’s going to take all the reserve I have not to comment with the first thing that comes to my mind:  What?  Leftovers again?!

There were several of these photos, posted, one after another:  different outfits, different positions, but all with the same moist-eyed, lips-parted expression.

Aren’t I pretty?  Don’t you want me?

Sure you are; and no, I don’t.

I was sorry to see #616 go.  We never shared a meal, laughed ourselves off the furniture, never even had a conversation.

But we will always have the fact that I know what she looks like in braided dental floss.  And I guess that’s something.  

That Was the Funnest Meeting EVER; or If I Could Just Get You to Stop That for a Moment...

There are three, physically, in the meeting.  A fourth, a woman with a devastating head cold, attends by phone. 

I sit on the “visitor’s” side of the desk, a bit of corporate real estate littered with toys:  beads, magnets, Silly Putty, “stress” balls. 

I am confused. 

The man sitting next to me – not his first visit, apparently – picks up the Silly Putty and removes it from its plastic, candy-colored egg.  He is rolling it out as the call is placed.  “Hello!  Can you hear me?”

The woman on the other end delivers an asthmatic greeting.  “I cad hear you, yeh,” she gasps.  “I’b sorry I’b dot inna office.”

The man next to me molds the Silly Putty around the plastic egg it came in, smooths its surface.  I turn away.  “We’re not,” I say.  “You sound completely contagious.”

There are polite chuckles from everyone but the man with the putty, who is working an elaborate design along its outside edge. 

“I think I’b gettig bedder,” she says.

Bless her.  She sounds as bad Tuesday as she did Monday.

The meeting proceeds, as meetings are wont to do, but I can't pay attention.

Like the hypnotic, glowing pulse of late-night television, my eyes return, again and again, to the Silly Putty, to the basket of toys.

“Go ahead and take one,” the office's resident whispers.  “That’s what they’re there for.”

But the thing is, I don’t want one.  And I don’t want him to want one, either.  I want to get to the point of this meeting, I want to learn what it is I don’t know, and I want to return to my desk, to write it up, to incorporate it into what I do next.

I don’t want to sit at the kids’ table.

I close my eyes, the better to concentrate on the woman on the phone. 


Holy Hannah.  I have entered "crotchety office worker" territory.  

Tamra’s Got the Heebie Jeebies

“There should be a protocol,” she stresses.  “There are reasonable expectations associated with the bus!”

I nod solemnly, pull out the book I keep on hand for such occurrences, and remove the cap from my pen.  “Why don’t you tell me about it?” I say.

“There’s this guy – he’s a big guy.  A really big guy.  And you know the size of those seats, right?”

I do, indeed.  Tamra rides daily on one of the city-to-suburbs buses, buses that look, for the most part, like a city bus, but are run independently.  They have Greyhound-fancy seats and, from what I understand, onboard masseuses. 

“So he sits down.  And he’s allowed that.  I’m not saying he shouldn’t sit with me.  But then he overlaps, and –“

Tamra shudders.  A slender, fashionable woman, one suspects, looking at her, that not only is her home in a visitor-ready state, but that her legs, despite it being January, have been recently shaved.

I like her anyway.

“—and you know how I feel about germs, right?  So there he is, he’s got his leg pressed – and I’m as close to the window as I can get! – against mine, I can feel his belly –“

Tamra is overcome.  I give her a moment.

“And then he pulls a newspaper out of his briefcase!  He pulls the newspaper out, snaps it open – and now I’ve got his arm clearly in my bubble –“

His arm is clearly in her bubble, I write, chuckling.

“ – and then – and then!”

I look up from my notes, reach for my coffee.  “And then?”

She closes her eyes, turns away, as if to push the memory away.  “He sneezes,” she says.  “Into the newspaper.”

I chuckle, despite myself.  I’ve watched Tamra disinfect a hallway after someone with a sniffle walks by.  Raised by a registered nurse, on a first-name basis with a number of exceedingly startling maladies, Tamra does not suffer a germ gladly.

“That’s not the worst of it,” she says, turning back, eyes haunted.  “After he sneezed into the newspaper, he – he –“

My eyes go round.  No.  My mother’s voice rises, somewhere in the back of my head; and suddenly, I know what Tamra will say next.

“No,” I say.

“Yes.”

I stare at her.

She looks away again.  “He picked his nose.  And then – “ 

I make a choking sound, but the worst is yet to come.

She looks up, troubled.  “He flicked it,” she says, wincing.  “He flicked it in the aisle.”

There is a moment’s silence as we consider this.

She turns back to her monitor, types quickly, a brief, staccato burst of sound.

“I see him all the time,” she says.  “But I keep my purse on the seat next to me.  I pretend to be digging in it until he passes.”

She turns back to look at me.  “It’s not right,” she says.  “me leaving my purse on the seat like that.  But really, there ought to be protocols.”  

The Marks They Left On Each Other

It's a departure.  Sorry -- I didn't mean to.  :-)

She is dizzy with panic.  Her hand on the phone on the kitchen wall, her palms are slick with the sweat borne of fear.

She has been calling everyone she can think of since Saturday morning. 

He hadn’t come home Friday, had simply left a message on the answering machine:  Going out after work.  Talk to you later.

And since then, she’d made a nuisance of herself, first among friends, then relatives, into a downward spiral of increasingly frantic calls to her mother, to the police, and, finally, to the hospitals.

There are a lot of police departments and hospitals between Minnesota and Wisconsin.

She starts cooking dinner late that Sunday afternoon, but the seasoned chops never make it to the oven.  She strips the corn on the cob, but can’t bring herself to cook it.  Adrenaline runs through her veins; and every now and then her muscles jump, as if she’s been startled.

Off in the distance, a small yellow sports car shoots toward the house, takes a right at the county road just a half-mile away.

Her chest pounds with such ferocity that she places a hand on it, the better to keep her heart from breaking through.

She runs out the kitchen door, onto the deck.  The sun is just setting, and it casts a warm, amber light over the simple summer day.

The car rolls into the parking lot.  He steps out, lopes easily up the flight of steps to their second-floor duplex, long hair and long limbs.

The smile on his face breaks her heart.

“What’s going on?” he grins.

A rage washes over her.  She picks up the hockey stick leaning against the side of the house, shakes it at him.

“What’s going on?”  She bursts into tears, swings wildly.  “Where have you been since Friday?”

He sneers at her, so young, so beautiful.  “What are you, my mother?”

She sees spots before her eyes.  She lifts the hockey stick and swings with all her might, connects solidly with his upper arm.

“OW!” he shouts.  “What the hell are you doing?”

“What am I doing?” she screams.  “What am I doing?”  She swings again, hits him.

“OW!” he screams.  “Back off!”

He opens the door, moves from the diffused light of a failing summer day to the blue-and-white cheer of a country kitchen.  She throws the hockey stick down, follows him, tears running down her face.

“Where have you been?  Where have you been?”

He opens the oven.  “No pork chops?”

Her lips quiver uncontrollably, her chin weak.  “Where have you been?” she whispers.

He whirls on her.  “You’re my girlfriend, Pearl, not my mother.”  He walks to the table, sits down, stares at her.  The room falls silent.  “I was with friends – guy friends.  We were just drinking.”

She turns away.

He was just drinking.

And just like that, she knows this to be true.

He was just drinking.

Suddenly she is dizzy.  She starts to laugh.

She walks to the fridge, pulls out a bottle of wine given to them almost a year ago.

Neither one of them drink wine.

She twists the cap off of it.

“What are you doing?” he says.

“What’s it look like I’m doing?” she says. 

“Don’t,” he says. 

She throws the cap in the sink.  “Yeah, but I wanna be like YOU.”

She raises the bottle, takes several hasty drinks.

“Stop it,” he says, sharply.  “You suck at drinking.”

“Why should I?  You drink.”

He stands, walks toward her.  “Give me the bottle.”

She raises the bottle again, holds her left arm out.  Stay away.  She turns away from him, spins to keep her back to him.

She drinks.  And drinks and drinks and drinks and –

He grabs the bottle, now almost three-quarters gone, pushes her away.  She stumbles toward the fridge, knocks into it.

He pours the last of the bottle into the sink.

 “You could’ve called,” she whispers.

He looks into her eyes, looks away.

“Where were you?”

“At my cousin’s.”

Tears roll down her face.  “I called your cousin.  She said you weren’t there.”

He looks at her and swallows.

“No.”  She shakes her head.  “She lied?  I’ve been sick with worry, and she lied?”  She leans against the fridge, slides down the front of it into a splayed-leg seat on the kitchen floor.  “I couldn’t sleep.  I couldn’t eat.  I thought you were –“

She chokes.

She looks up at him.  “I thought you were dead.  I called everywhere.  I wanted to make dinner tonight, you know?  For us?  For our Sunday dinner?”

He nods, his eyes filling with tears.

“But I coulden.  I coulden do it ‘cause if you were dead, then the police would come while I was settin the table.  They would tell me, oh, that guy you love?  He’s dead.  Sorry.”  Her words grew heavier, simpler.  “And then for the res’ o’ my life, I could never ever eat pork chops again.  I would never eat another ear of corn, because that’s what I was cookin’ the day he died.”

He drops to his knees, his arms out and she presses into him.  “I love you,” he says.  “You know how much I love you.  I’m so sorry.  I’m not dead.  See?  I’m not dead.”

She pushes her face into his neck, sobs his name.  “But I thought you were.  You coulda been, and I wouldn’t have known ‘til the police came during my Sunday dinner!”

He puts a finger under her chin.  She looks into his eyes.  “I didn’t know,” he says.  “I didn’t know.”

She belches suddenly, leans away from him.  “I’m gonna be sick.  Oh, God.” 

She pushes away from the floor, pushes away from him, veers into the oven, then the kitchen table. 

“Here,” he says, laughing.  “I’ll help you.”

He puts his arms around her, helps her to the bathroom, where she collapses in front of the toilet.

"I luh you," she says.

"I know you do.  I love you, too."

“Don’t looka me,” she says.

He sits on the edge of the tub.  “I won’t,” he says.

Not The Same At All; or Nurse! My Smelling Salts!

He is skeptical that I will be able to withstand an in-the-office procedure.

I cock my head at him, give him the ol’ Spaniel eyes.  “But we’re already here,” I say.  “Willie won’t have another vacation day until January. “

The doctor, a tall man with slender, pale fingers and the endearingly whimsical name of “Tor”, probes the edges of the lipoma.  Just under the skin of my right shoulder and the length and breadth of a medium-sized plum, the tumor moves slightly. 

“How are you with pain?”

I shrug.  “I can take it or leave it.”

He smiles.  “But you bear it well?”

I sit up straighter.  “Are you saying that you’re out of Novocaine?” 

“No, no,” he says.  “But there won’t be anything else.”

I look around the spare, clean room.  “You really should have some gas in here.  It’s all the rage with the dentists, you know.”

He smiles.  “So we’ll do the procedure, ja?”

“Let’s do it,” I say.

Several shots of local anesthetic later, he begins to cut.  The tugging at my right shoulder is noticeable, but I’ve been married over 10 years.

There’s nothing I can’t ignore.

“Do you know how drunk I’d have to be to do this without some sort of numbing agent?”  I am reclined, settled into something of a medical La-Z-Boy,  the top of my right shoulder bare.  The doctor is standing behind me.  I can feel him smile.

“Maybe a little for you, a little for the wound,” he says.

“I spent last week in New Orleans,” I say into the air.  “Three words:  Civil War amputations.”

“Ah!” he says.  “Horrible conditions.  Just horrible.”

I feel the tugging at my shoulder.  “50,000 amputations in four years,” I say.

There is silence.

“Modern medicine is a wonderful thing,” the doctor says.

I nod, careful to move nothing but my head.  “Yep,” I say.  “It’s a great time to be alive.”

Just a Moment with Mary and Pearl

Ring.  Ring-ring.

“Good afternoon, Global Octopus, a World Domination Enterprise.  Pearl speaking.”

“Pearl?  I did a bad thing.”

I brace myself.  When Mary has done a bad thing, it can be an exceedingly bad thing indeed. 

I check my cube mate for signs of listening, a furtive gesture.   She is humming what I believe may be a hymn.

“What’d you do?”

Mary presses her lips against the phone, a gesture I find endearing, whispers into it conspiratorially.  “Kathy said I could have a cupcake.”

Mary has lost almost 30 pounds in the last four, maybe five months.  I’ve spent the last month or so warning her:  You need to stop now.  You look really awesome, and this is putting pressure on me.  Cut it out.

“You didn’t.”

“I did.  After I finished cleaning her place, I had a cupcake!”  She laughs, lost in the memory.  “It was a cupcake.  From a cupcake place.  You know.  The kind that specializes in cupcakes.  A dense, moist, love-filled assemblage of ingredients that reminded me of the time –“

“Mary!”  I shout into the phone.  I have not had this kind of – gulp! – moist, heady carb for, oh, a year, and I find my mouth watering involuntarily. 

Tamra turns, eyes wide. 

“Shutty, Mary,” I hiss into the phone.  “You just stop that right now.”

Mary laughs.  “It really wasn’t that good,” she lies.

“You lie,” I say.  “And I love you for it.”

There is silence as we contemplate the warped direction our friendship sometimes takes.

“ANYway,” she says, as if shaking herself awake, “I’m at Lund’s, gonna pick up some vegetables for tonight.”

“Try to remember that there are no vegetables in the bakery section,” I mutter.

“Oh, I LOL,” she chortles.  “I LOL at you.”

I smile.  “Enjoy your shopping.”

“Talk to ya later, Pearl.”

The Side Effects are What’ll Get Ya

I was recently on the receiving end of a dose of antibiotics.

I will be forever grateful.

But prescription drugs come with extras.

“Avoid Direct Sunlight.”  “May Cause Dizziness.”  “May Cause Vivid Dreams”.

Avoid direct sunlight?  It’s Minneapolis in January. 

Done.

And it causes dizziness? I accept the challenge.  Insufficient Eustachian tubes ensure that I never take my balance for granted.  How would I know if the spins were organic or not? 

But the vivid dreams --

May Cause Vivid Dreams.

That one’s mine.  That’s my side effect.

For years now, and long before I had actually read the fine print, I have known that some drugs cause nightmares.  Under their direction, I’ve woken from deep sleeps shaking and terrified, eyes wide, scanning the darkness for unnamed assailants.

But this prescription?

This one?

I had a dream the other night that was just about the poorest excuse for a dream I’ve ever had.

The details are fuzzy – I was asleep at the time – but I know the following things:

I am rock climbing, except it is primarily sand.  In the middle of a particularly tasty slope I manage to dislodge a boulder.  It rolls to the center of the quaint dirt road at the bottom of the ravine, where it stops and ensures that some unknown animal just beyond it is stuck in the barn without feed.

Concurrently, I find that I’ve been locked in a bathroom.  There is a man in a black suit, looking a bit like Rod Serling, trying to get in through the window.  “Have you,” he shouts through the glass, “accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into your life as your personal lord and savior?”

It is at this time that I poop my pants.  It is a surprisingly clean, nonchalant affair. 

Really, if I hadn’ta told ya, you’da never knowed.

It is shortly after this that I am physically encroached upon in such a ridiculously inept display of eagerly budding sexuality that I shudder to recall it.  It was earnest, it was awkward – Let’s just say that the words “fumble” and “ham-handed” spring to mind and call it a day.

The dreams caps itself off with me waking myself by biting the hands I have tucked under my chin.

I bite myself awake.

I am grateful, of course, for the drugs, and know that there are far more serious side effects available to me. 

But I just can’t shake that awful make-out session. 

Part Two: What Happened to the Fence; or Nothing Good Happens After You’re Kicked Out of The Vegas

You didn’t miss part one of this little tale, did you?  It was posted yesterday.  Go ahead – go back and read it.  We’ll wait for you.

George lifts her beer.   “You remember Maryanne?”

“Heavy drinker, elfin facial features, somewhere between 60 and 65, maybe?”

George nods, takes a drink.  “Yeep.  So that means you remember Connie, then, too.”

Maryanne and Connie are two peas from the same drunken pod, with Connie just slightly older.  They are loud, happy drinkers with a penchant for The Statler Brothers and those weird purple shots provided (for free) after Viking touchdowns.

I nod.  “What does this have to do with the fence?”

“Or the tree or the car or the deck we just had a smoke on…”

I laugh. “What?”

George laughs, lifts those eyes – those beautiful,eye-liner-ed eyes! – and smiles.  “I know things.”

I cock my head at her, squint.  “Things,” I say, rolling the word around on my tongue.  “Tell me things.”

George takes another drink of her beer.  “I went to see The Music Man with Tom not too long ago.  You remember Tom, don’t you?”

I do.  Tom, like Maryanne and Connie, is a long-time resident of The Spring.  A man who studied at a seminary and talks philosophy with the earnest intensity of a teenager, he no longer drinks but tolerates well those who do.

I nod. 

“So in the course of dinner, before the show, he tells me about the night Maryanne got kicked out of The Vegas.”

I choke on my beer and we both burst into laughter.  “You can get kicked out of The Vegas?!”

The Vegas, a dive bar off Central with the coldest beer you can imagine and karaoke seven nights a week, is a throwback to another time.  Wood paneling, pull tabs, light fixtures from the seventies – we clink our glasses to the thought of anyone getting drunk enough to be kicked out of this bar.

“So she gets in her car,” George says, setting her glass down, “and drives the five blocks to The Spring.”

I raise my eyebrows.

“She comes in, manages to order two, maybe three drinks before the bartender realizes how wasted she is and cuts her off.”

“How could you not notice,” I say.  “Maryanne has to be one of the loudest drunks I’ve ever heard.”

“There is wisdom in what you say,” George reflects.  “And yet the facts speak for themselves.”

We consider this.

“So anyway, she’s cut off.  Maryanne decides to leave.  So she gets back into her car – and drives into that low planter, the one that runs around the smoking deck?  Everyone on it starts yelling, raises their glasses.  She freaks out, backs up – kitty corner, across the street – and straight into the fence.  Runs the fence over, actually backs completely over it.  She starts yelling – you can hear her from the bar, Tom says – backs up, puts her into drive and runs into a tree.  Backs up again, straightens it out – and hits a parked car.”

George pauses, takes a drink of her beer.  “At this point, Maryanne is completely freaked, gets out of her car – which wasn’t even her car, come to think of it, but her boyfriend’s car – and she takes off running down the street!  Right down the middle of the street!  She later tells friends that she was going to Connie’s, going to ask Connie if she’d hide her until things blew over.”

“But it was her boyfriend’s car. How would things blow over?”

George shrugs.  Our server glides past, backs up.  “Two more?”

“Two more,” I say.

“So then what?” I say. 

George starts laughing.  “So while this little loudmouthed woman is running down the middle of the street, crushed fences and trees and cars in her wake, who pulls up?”

I stare at her.

“The cops!  The cops pull up!”

“Uh-oh.”

George shakes her head.  “No ‘uh-oh’,” she says.  “And you know why?”

I shake my head.

“Because she’s adorable!  Because she’s a little old lady!  ‘I was confused, officer!  My shoelaces got caught in the accelerator and I got scared, officer!’”

My mouth drops open.

“She played the age card,” George says, shaking her head.  “The police actually drove her home.  No arrest, no ticket, nothing.”

“Senior citizens are devious creatures,” I say, “and we have much to learn from them.”

George laughs.  “Indeed we do,” she says.  She leans into her backpack, checks her cell phone.  “Look at that,” she says.  “Our bus comes in 30 minutes, and ooooh -" she looks up, smiling.  "Here come our beers!”

Part One: Funny Story, That Fencing

I am staring out the bus window.

It is late summer.  All things in Minnesota, by the way, are referenced by season, and I recall the grass, the warm breeze, the wanton display of my bare ankles on a city bus – and the tore-up chain link fence around the four-plex kitty-corner from The Spring…

This sort of thing makes me frown.

The Spring is one of my favorite bar and grills.  It has everything you expect in a local joint:  affordable drink specials, truly delicious burgers, and rosy-nosed drinkers earnestly holding down bar stools, some of them for long enough to be served by different shifts of bartenders.

This is the bar where I once watched a remarkably happy man belt AC/DC tunes to an equally happy following whilst punctuating the bass line with "thazz mah dawg".

It haunts me.

I am still frowning at the tire tracks that lead up and over the boulevard and into a now rather ineffective bit of fencing when, less than a block away, I notice a good chunk of bark torn off a sizeable oak tree.

Well that ain’t right, is it?

I consciously stop frowning, attempt to smooth my brow with my fingertips.  

This place is gonna give me wrinkles.

Still, life -- and the bus -- goes on.  It is several weeks before the chain link fence is fixed, but the tree, and its missing bark, roughly headlights high, stares daily into my commute.

It is October, I suppose, when I meet George for drinks.

I specifically remember my suede boots, no danger of rain.

We are at a booth, finishing what strikes me as our third beer.  The day is crisp and shiny, the kind of autumn day when one stands amidst the fallen and falling leaves and smiles:  summer was beautiful, and winter’s not yet here.  How lucky we are!

We step outside on the large deck, George and I, artfully cadge a cigarette from those we believe to be our admirers.

“That fence across the street got hit by a car this summer,” I say. 

George looks at me.  “You know who did that, don’t you?”

I start laughing.  Maybe it’s the beer, maybe it’s the cigarette, but this strikes me as funny. 

“I know a lot of things,” I say.  “But I don’t know who hit that fence.”

George exhales, takes another thoughtful inhale and tosses the butt into an ashtray balanced on the deck’s railing. 

“It’s a drunken tale of jealousy, lawlessness, and age discrimination,” she says.  “Buy me a beer and I’ll tell you about it.”

Hmm.  George has a tale for us…