Unfirom, hands folded behind his back, was studying the crowd at the tennis court. None of these came within the bounds of his assignment, but this changed sometimes after a single lob.
He felt a sense of foreboding, perhaps involving tennis, perhaps not. Anyone who dealt regularly with phronik felt foreboding every few hours in any case. Unless the full company was in view, what they might be up to was a worry to wrinkle even an angel’s brow.
Turning, he set off across the grass to the other end of the park, and the softball diamond. The foreboding built: a lot of it seemed concentrated around a red cardboard rectangle at the far curve of the track. This turned out to be a discarded container half filled with fries from Booty Burger. Two torn packets of ketchup nearby were drawing ants. Not a single phron was here to gorge herself.
His head came up, turning slowly. That meant they were busy at something: a more interesting discard, like ice cream, or another batch of hopeless cookies in the kitchen, or something serious. His gaze took in 360degrees of the park and its environs.
Then he was running forward, his old days as a guardian angel bursting out in his voice. “Wait!”
He was there in less than a second, and was still too late. His forehead hit the invisible barrier that marked the end of his domain and he froze in mid-stride. Now he shouted, “Don’t wait! Hurry!” He knew she couldn’t hear him, but the full force of his will was behind the call.
The woman running diagonally across the street was moving as fast as she could. She was on the center line when the florist’s truck came around the blind corner, moving far too fast. She might still have made it but for the trailing end of the banner she had clutched in her arms. A foot landed on one corner.
“Yehapsekatory!” she shouted, falling backward. Unfirom knew at once how pleased she would be at such unconventional last words.
The truck sent her spinning and sped on, barely missing a man who had also run into the street. The man stared after the truck for a moment and then dropped to one knee beside the woman. He shouted something even less coherent than what she had said, and ran to a nearby door. It occurred to Unfirom that the developer should have remembered there was a public phone in the fieldhouse. But it didn’t matter.
“Aw, gee!”
“Some people just can’t handle love!”
Unfirom turned. The four phronik looked up at him, mouths tiny and eyes huge, their hands behind their backs. He didn’t need to ask, he supposed. “Was this your doing?”
“We were just seein’ if we could do something for the park,” said Bluebell, hips wiggling.
“And for them!” Primrose put in. “They would have had fun, too!”
“Havin’ plenty of fun now, aren’t they?” said Meadow Saffron, leaning over on one side to peer past the angel at the gathering crowd.
“Aw!” The tears dropping off Sweet Pea’s cheeks were about as big as her ears. “We didn’t mean for any old truck to come by!”
“This is what happens when you try to move outside your assignments,” Unfirom intoned.
Bluebell sniffed. “Well, she’s the one who ran. If she’d stood still, we’d’ve had her!”
“Him too,” murmured Meadow Saffron.
Sweet Pea looked behind her, rubbing her fists into her cheeks to grind the tears away. “No, we’ll never forget her. We’ll weep for her forever!”
Primrose looked over at her. “For who?”
Sweet Pea’s damp right hand waved toward the street. “Oh, yu know! Her! What’s her….”
“Peter Cottontail!” cried Bluebell.
“That will not bring her back,” the angel told them.
“Well, it’s a gesture,” said Meadow Saffron, chin up.
“So’s this,” said Bluebell, moving her hand in a signal not associated with angels.
Unfirom opened his mouth to speak, but Sweet Pea cried, “Oooh! The ambulance!”
The developer was there to watch the young lady being loaded in. He leaned forward. “Of course I’ll remember you!” he said, voice choking on relief.
His relief was misplaced. Unfirom new he had the right idea, but the wrong ghost. “You have….”
Turning, the angel saw the phronik had discovered a dissolving ice cream sandwich on one of the benches. Wrong to blame them for leaving, he knew: their attention spans were brief, and they had seen worse accidents in and around the park, though very few of their own making.
Perhaps the woman had been destined to die today in any case. Unfirom did not feel any lightening of his feeling of failure. And it might work out for the best: the developer might change his ways, or at least his designs, in some small way, remembering the activist. He glanced at the police car pulling up, and the young man I the formerly immaculate suit rushing to talk to them.
Just there, between Unfirom and the police car, there appeared the briefest image of a dark pinstripe suit. No head appeared above it, and the suit was gone at once.
Very little remained of August N. Griese in the park that bore his name. Only Unfirom ever saw him, and then only when the light was right, generally at dusk. But something of him remained, imploring young lovers to remember him. Unless he was addressing that admonition to Unfirom which it was impossible to determine.
Griese had been a busy man in life, far too busy for young love, middle-aged ove, or love late in life. He died, as he had feared, leaving no one to remember him, except in dry business connections. His will endowed the park, for lack of anything else to do with the money, and it was the only place on earth close enough to him to claim even a fragment of his ghost.
Unfirom had thought all along that he was doing a good job as Griese’s guardian angel. Hriese (funny how he could never think of the man as Gus, or even August) had been kept from the more serious forms of disease or injury, and any danger of crime or heartbreak. After Griese’s death, however, he was informed that his performance had left much to be desired. Guarding his charge from life’s unpleasant surprises had gone far enough to ensure the man enjoyed very little life at all. This assignment was the result of that performance evaluation.
The ambulance was gone. The developer was helping bundle the stained banner into the back of the squad car. He was talking far too much and too quickly, but it didn’t matter. The sympathetic cop had stopped taking notes some time ago, and was now just listening. The developer was asking what would happen to the banner when the investigation was concluded, and wondering whether he could have it.
Unfirom shook his head. In the distance, he could hear the ambulance’s siren, backing the phronik as they sang.
“Cousin Kenneth made a wax with oily streaks
Which made a candle burn for nearly eighty weeks;
To make a million dollars should have been a lark,
I was told over and over as a child—it was one of those things teachers felt we should know—that jack o’lanterns were originally made of turnips, not pumpkins. We all wanted to know whether they had birthday cake candles in those days, but that was all we ever got: in the olden days, people used turnips. I imagine one day when I that the device in this postcard was a camera, children will cry. “But how did she hold it to her ear to make calls?” I will just move on to some other bizarre fact, like how they’ll be glad when they grow up that they had to study geometry.
Some of you complained about the most recent column in this space (which is nice, since I was unaware anybody was still reading anything in this space.) I wrote about bygone technology seen in old postcards and I just left out everything that mattered. “Where are the phone booths? Did you see that recent Superman movie where Christopher Reeve tries to change but all he can find is a small phone kiosk?” So, without even HINTING that this recent movie was made in 19678 (some twenty years ago, now, allowing for Daylight Savings), I thought we could cover a few omitted items. Here, for example, is a classic alarm clock, beloved in movies and postcards and now also replaced by phones and other bellowing electronic devices.
When I was working the used book line, I would defend putting out typing textbooks by pointing out that even if the typewriter was leaving us, we could still sell the textbooks, since now everyone was “keyboarding”. But that was when the keyboard itself was not an endangered species. What do they call the method of texting? Thumbing? Does it all work the same way?
When I first lived in the Big City, there were still lads selling newspapers on street corners. “TREE-bune!” they would bellow. “GITcher TREE-bune!” I suppose this kind of work would now be child endangerment. (I know I was occasionally tempted to shove a loudmouth under a bus.)
Yes, somehow we still make toys, but as noted in our latest column, when we discussed sheet music departments in stores, when did you last see a toy department…WITH counters, and with some clerk BEHIND every counter? Not only could the stores cut costs by getting rid of the attendants, more treasures could be put out on view without those old one-sided displays.
Once upon a time, LOTS of cartoonists for naughty magazines used this now wildly incomprehensible gag. The viewer has to know what a pay phone is, what the coin return slot looked like, AND understand that once people—mainly women—sat at something called a switchboard and answered questions and connected callers. All, all gone in our new efficiently electronic world. (Naughty jokes especially are ruined if they need footnotes to explain the point.)
A lot of the preceding involve items recent generations MIGHT recognize, but this object, seen without being named by most postcards, was obsolete even in my boy days during the Mid-Pleistocene. The growler, as mentioned hereintofore, was the family beer can, and one rushed it by taking it to the local bar to be filled with the day’s supply of beer. (Fresh milk and running water were little known in most of the Big City, and beer was freshly brewed and nutritious—both factors which were discarded, like the growler, when canned beer became the norm.)
Is anyone ASKED to bring music to a party these days? In those primitive days I inhabited, people were sort of sliding from bringing a book filled with 45 RPM records with one’s name in big letters o them, to the efficiency of bringing albums. But a people decades before, used to being told to bring their ukulele or guitar and some sheet music, would have recognized that THIS chap is hauling over a street musician’s hurdy-gurdy: once again, a victim of electronic media (and how many people regret that?)
I can only vouch for the old movies and cartoons which showed us kids strapping their schoolbooks together with a small leather belt, frequently endangering their educations by running like this (if one book slips loose, they ALL slip loose.) They had to do something before backpacks came along I suppose.
If you are tired of contemplating the human rush to change and replace the fabric of everyday life, let’s look at something completely else. THIS postcard comes from that early day when messages had to be written on the PICTURE side of the postcard (which came to an end in 1907) and yet…the safety pin of that distant day is still familiar. I’m not saying any of our works is immortal, but we DO sometimes make something right the first time.
I was looking over a new postcard for my inventory and thought, “Wow! How much longer does THAT joke have to live?” I realized that even I understand some of these old postcard gags simply because I had read about the basic idea in books, or seen them in old movies. A joke depends on the audience immediately recognizing the situation and the props, and some of these are moving into museums (like my inventory, which is a collection of things I THOUGHT I was going to sell.) So I thought we would observe some of these endangered jokes as they pass. We will not be discussing fashion, which becomes obsolete so quickly, northings like the check shown above. Checks may be doomed, but their extinction date is still uncertain. We will also not be covering jokes which became extinct because they weren’t all that lively to start with. We can discuss Fine Old Jokes like that in some other space.
This is the postcard that provoked my column. ARE there still buildings where you can pe through the keyhole? How many buildings built in the last twenty years or so bother with locks that require keys? Fortunately, there are still Old Dark House movies, where a gang of meddling kids winds up in a vintage domicile. As long as we still have haunted houses on the hill….
We weren’t going to discuss fashion, but that thing sticking out of her hat did last through a couple of generations of hats and windy weather. The hatpin probably still exists in some sleek, discreet modified form, but back in the day, they were highly decorated and intended to be admired. (That’s ONE reason they stuck out this way. The second reason was that it made the pin easier to reach if your date was getting too close to your vanilla malt.)
How many modern viewers would recognize this as a pen and an inkwell? No: Martha me no Stewarts. I KNOW you may use these for your wedding invitations, but after THAT your pen will be another thing you move around on your desk and the inkwell will dry up in a corner like all inkwells of the past sixty years.
Do you see the highly dangerous item in this picture? No, NOT the spoon he’s trying to hold off. And those of you who said something about the young lady’s…well, you will stay after class and write a six page essay on how sorry you are. That object over on the left is a chafing dish, which three generations of college kids sneaked into their dorm room despite warnings from four generations of college administrators that these fire hazards were NOT allowed. They have been replaced in dorm rooms by toaster ovens and/or microwaves (on special all last month at stores and all still banned by most dorms. THAT hasn’t changed.)
Sheet music still exists, but gets rarer every year in a world where electronic substitutes abound. And store departments which sell only sheet music? These survive only on postcards.
I have done no in-depth analysis, but I believe free-standing bathtubs with legs now exist primarily in those haunted house movies we discussed earlier. Yes, there may be a few high-priced architects who may be trying to bring them back, but this classic model, which virtually required a step ladder to get in and out of, is probably now classed as a danger to life and limb.
And there may well be amusement parks and such which preserve the old street scale, where you inserted a penny to get your weight and fortune. But once, if we believe postcards and vintage movies, they were all over shopping districts. Never mind the scales for a moment, outdoor vending machines used to be all over town: not just around one side of the gas station. Were the peanut and gum and candy machines victims of a rising crime rate? Or of rising prices which would now require you to swipe a plastic card through the machine (IF you have enough funds in the account to cover a whole pack of gum?)
I’m afraid I was assuming that flypaper, once a staple of silent comedy, short cartoons, and postcard gags, was still available for sale to old-timers. But a glance through the shopping pages on the Interwebs shows me only a movie of that title, and a brand of jeans. So I guess if you were hoping to buy some for your next slapstick TikTok, you’re stuck. (I TOLD you, we’re not going to be criticizing extinct jokes. Just let them fly by.)
“Here!” He set his ice cream sandwich on the backrest of the bench. Really, this woman was either the most clumsy or least lucky female in the city. A trailing corner of that banner had blown up in the wind and wound around one ankle. As she was busy pulling her other ankle free of another corner, this nearly sent her facefirst onto the sidewalk.
“Thank you!” Breathless, she tried to help by pulling free, setting a foot down on the cloth…and his fingers. ”I…why does it keep doing that?”
“Just being contrary,” he said, maintaining his smile as he blew on his bruised fingers.
He was no fool. He could read what was on the banner. This woman was another of the troublemakers, trying to rally a few more. Nonetheless, he patiently unwound the fabric. If he was helpful and pleasant, he might be able to lure her away from the chief Luddite, one Peter Abbott who disapproved of quiet, tidy parks and kept mailing out huge registered envelopes filled with poorly spelled petitions. It would be fun to try, at least.
“It’s a good thing you didn’t wear heels.” He just missed a corner of fabric as the wind whipped it around; the banner did seem to be tangling the woman’s feet. Still, he should have expected every facet of this anti-park crusade to be disagreeable.
She leaned over to grab part of the disobedient banner. “Oh, I never wear heels to the park.”
You could, if it were the proper sort of park, he thought, but it was too soon to say something like that. “Look nice, though,” he said, leaning closer to the banner so she wouldn’t catch his expression.
Ordinarily, he wouldn’t amuse himself at the expense of a stranger, but not only was she one of the enemy, he had to pass the time somehow. His designs could go no further until he knew the project was on, and what would be his part in it. He had produced forty-three separate designs for their consideration, not including dozens of alternate fieldhouses, all of which would be pointless if the project was abandoned. One more sketch of this little patch of grass, and his brain would be stuck on it, like the old computer monitors with no screen saver. Decades from now, he’d be hunched over a drawing board, cackling over his one millionth distribution of wrought iron benches.
A chortle came from deep inside her: a warm sound. “Oh, I don’t need heels. Even with these, I have men at my feet.”
He thought this an old joke, but he chuckled in reply. “Well, I can’t complain about anything in your wardrobe except this cape. This is a style that won’t catch on.’
“It seems to be catching on everything.” She twisted and tugged ineffectually at a part of the banner she was sitting on. Her face suddenly hardened; she’d seen where his eyes were pointed. Her knees slapped together, which made the banner snap up at his nose.
She was instantly contrite. “Did that hit you?” She tried to rise for a better look, which tightened the banner at her calves and made her sit down hard.
“It’s nothing.” Keping his eyes on the cloth, he set one hand firmly on a seam: there had to be a scientific answer to this. Her clothes were encouraging, though, and his eyes kept moving away from the job at hand. So many women who went everywhere in sweatpants had soft round bottoms. Hardhipped people favored shorts. Anyway, that was his theory. He never had time to research these topics. Not with so many more fieldhouses to design.
And there was a practical side to this new project: anyone he could win over to a sensible view of this park would make the world a better place. His duty, really. “Didn’t I see you wearing this cape earlier today?”
She was still a little flushed, and strove to keep her tone businesslike. But she was simply not that kind of person. “I’ve seen you here before, too. Did you know this park is in danger of being ruined for the people who use it?” Her voice squeaked on the last two words, defusing her dramatic flourish.
He fought to keep his smile from becoming smug. “Well, it is hard to get people to listen to reason when it comes to real estate.”
She nodded violently. “That’s what we said when someone tried to turn that old cemetery outside of town into an industrial park.”
“Ph, well.” He shrugged. “Same as a park, really, only the people stay overnight.”
She thought he sounded very level-headed. Peter had noticed at once how he adjusted at once when she let him know his gaze was getting too personal. He might make a good recruit for the movement: he seemed to visit the park often enough.
His hand unavoidably slid along her right thigh as he struggled with the banner. She licked her lips and looked away across the scraggly grass. “They want to take away all this and put in flower gardens where people can’t walk or play.”
“Well, I suppose all things have t change.”
She’d heard THAT often enough; her answer was ready. “Nothing has to change for the worse if we can help it.”
Even if things did have to change, she thought, we can still have little spots for illusions of permanence. She did not say this; it seemed to shock people more than anything else she said. “Change is good,” they told her, and they seemed to believe it. She’d need to know this man better before she moved on to THAT discussion. Contests were won a step at a time.
“I like flower gardens,” he said, meekly enough.
“They have their place,” Peter informed him. “And so do grand sidewalks and so do fountains. But this isn’t one of those places. This is a park where people can stretch out for a nap, or play Frisbee, or eat lunch, without a lot of warning signs.” She was aware that a sign just behind her warned dog owners to observe the civilities. Impossible, she supposed, to have a public park with no signs at all. To say so would weaken her point, of course. That this was a park where life was unstructured: “DO NOT WALK ON GRASS” was silly where the grass was this intermittent, and no one put up “DO NOT PICK FLOWERS” signs where only dandelions flourished.
“And where they can toss their hamburger wrappers,” he grunted, tugging at a length of banner which had somehow gotten tied into a knot.
“That’s the price of letting people use their own park.” Her voice was curt; she preferred to keep his mind off fast food. The rumor that she was being sponsored by Booty Burger had led to a lot of predictable jokes about her shape. To be sure, from the look of him, he was probably tidy and thoroughly scheduled. What would that be like? The opposite was tedious: she had no idea where she’d put the check from the Armstrongs, and she really needed to sit down and fill in her amended tax forms. (So many lines and blanks: how did anyone get it right the first time?) Maybe she should ask this guy what he did for a living. He LOOKED like an accountant.
“I wouldn’t for the world tell you what to do n YOUR park,” he growled, a hand snapping out to grab a corner of the banner as it was jerked away by the wind. “But no one’s going to approve of these weird banner bondage games I public.”
AND he had a sense of humor. She laughed, but nearly fell off the bench as she pulled away from his hands. “Now what are you doing?”
“Well, I ALMOST had that unwound.” He rocked back and grimaced at the tangle of banner still cluttering her lower limbs. “Did you HAVE to use that much Velcro?”
“The banner’s heavy.” He wasn’t groping; she was imagining things? She was so sensitive nowadays: back in the Peace Corps she had worked as nearly naked as was prudent for someone who burned as readily as she did. Then she’d used outdoor showers and field toilets, and now she was wondering if her blouse—UNDER her jacket—was too thin.
Every time he looked up, he found her face freezing. If he didn’t get this banner sorted out soon, she would assume he was doing it slowly on purpose. “If I can get this….”
She squeaked. Some of that Velcro was still attached, and the tug had brought her sweatpants down half an inch. She grabbed the waistband.
He knew better than to try to help, and rocked back, keeping his hands in view. “I’ve always been one for progress, and adults know nothing comes without a price.”
“Are you referring to the park?” She nearly said something more, but clamped her mouth shut. She would in no way change the remark around by mentioning her pants. She threw an arm down over her bellybutton, and tried to remember whether today’s underpants still had elastic left in THEIR waist.
“No. I meant this Velcro.” He set his hands on his knees. “Tell you what: if you just wear this thing as a sash, you won’t need to put it up anywhere.”
“It keeps coming down.” She pulled the sweatpants up farther than they’d been to start with. “The banner, that is. I mean, I need lots of Velcro.”
His eyes SEEMED to be on the banner as he replied, “I suppose you would.”
An image jumped into her mind of herself dressed as the Baby New Year wearing nothing but this sash. She shoved both hands hard against the uppermost level of the laminated fabric. “And the wind…I mean, I don’t know….”
“Stop! Don’t move! Don’t breathe!”
She froze. In that moment, he shoved one hand under one buttock and gave her a quick lift. His other hand performed some act of magic by her ankles and, magically, the banner was all over the ground at her feet.
“Yay!”
They might cheer together, but all the while, she was angling so that when she got up, her butt would be pointing anywhere besides at him. “Well,” she said, rolling toward the bedraggled fabric, “That makes this a banner week.” She could still feel the warmth of his hand. He had a firm touch and…long fingers.
He rocked back on his haunches again, sighing. “Banner year. Well, getting it loose of your heels makes it quite a feat.”
“You have the healing touch.” Getting her feet under her, she reached down to roll up the banner. This was slow going, as the waists of her jacket and blouse somehow kept getting mingled with the top of the fabric, and when they caught, they pulled down.
She cleared her throat. “Er, you wouldn’t want to come to our next rally, would you? Just to see how the banner behaves?”
He blinked, wondering if she knew that kneeling on the ground to roll the fabric pulled those sweatpants really tight. Oh, he wished she wasn’t part of that gang. That one shove had demonstrated that her bottom had exactly the consistency he’d suspected. Shaking his head, he recalled her eyes were on him and said, “er. What?”
Oh Lord, she had big eyes this close. “Oh, well, you know: we’re having another rally for the park. I could make you Vice President for Banner Control.”
He laughed, without feeling especially entertained. Of course, she DID need somebody to take charge of that banner. She wasn’t even rolling it right: instead of a tight, compact roll she was turning it at an angle, producing what would be a long, draggy bundle. It would be falling apart again before she walked another block. But he had a feeling if he reached out to help her, he was lost forever. “Um, when is it?”
“Um.” It was the first excuse she’d thought of; she hadn’t really though about that bit. Rough if she just named a date and the rally was a washout like today’s. Although the thought of a private rally for two, just herself and this…promising new recruit for the cause….
“I’d, uh, have to see what the museum….” Damn! Looking down, she found she’d rolled the banner into a long thin cigarette. Well, she could act like she’d meant to do it. Pulling the loose coil into one arm, she rose and shoved her free hand through her hair. “You never know when to hold these things, meetings I mean, without….” Wow, he was tall! “We try to pick a day when somebody from the developer’s office might attend. He never sends anyone, though.”
He wondered if she knew what her nose did when she said “developer”. He also wondered whether she knew how many times she had licked her lips during the last few sentences.
“Of course he’d never come himself,” she went on, setting indignant fists against magnificent hips and nearly losing the banner in the process.
“Of course?” he inquired.
Her hair snapped at him as she tossed her head. “He told the City our petitions were meaningless, not that he ever looked at them. He’s never even replied to our invitations.”
So eyes could genuinely flash! Really, there had to be a way to win this woman over to the side of civic improvements. “Maybe he would come, if he thought he’d get a chance to talk.”
She stared, her mouth dropping open. Round lips snapped shut, opened again, shut once more, and then demanded. “Why shouldn’t he talk? Everybody talks at those meetings!”
He spread out his hands, palm up. “Yes, but he’d be on enemy territory. I doubt he’d get two sentences together before somebody interrupted.”
Neither of them noticed that the lower end of the banner seemed to be loosening, letting fabric curl to the ground. She shrugged. “Yes, but everybody interrupts, too. And we….”
“But in his case they’d be correcting, or objecting. Or just shouting anti-development slogans.” He took a step forward. “I know how these things work, especially if they’re orchestrated by that evil genius of theirs…yours. That Peter Abbott.”
Her eyes came level with his for a moment, and then dropped to one shoe, kicking dirt at the edge of the sidewalk.
“Actually,” she murmured, “I’m Peter Abbott.”
“I beg your pardon?” He took a step back and lowered his head to peer into her face.
Her eyes came to his again. “That’s my name. Peter Abbott.”
He looked her up and down from razzled hair to sensible shoes, pausing only briefly at her hips. All he could say was “WHY?”
One shoulder bounced. “My parents were part of that whole creative baby name generation. They named me after their favorite book.”
He frowned. “Their…I see. Peter Abbott. Peter Rabbit.”
“Well, no.” She had explained this so many times it hardly even bothered her any more, much. But she wanted him to know. “It was Peter Churchmouse. My full name is Peter Churchmouse Abbott.”
“You’re joking.”
“I’m Peter Abbott.” She reached into a jacket pocket and brought out a card. She blushed to see one corner was bent: real business card people wouldn’t have used that one. But she handed it to him, leaving that hand extended to shake his.
He didn’t take her hand. His face was utterly blank as he looked at the little bent cardboard ad. She understood when he reached into his own jacket pocket. Modern business didn’t involve handshakes but little cards.
She smiled and glanced at what was in her hand. People were always giving her cards, and somehow, she never…. She looked at the name again.
“But that’s…you’re…you’re the….”
“Evil force of blind heedless change, I think it was.” He kept his eyes on her face, after a quick glance at her hands. Whether it was because he was honestly afraid they might become fists again, or because one was still close to that hip, he couldn’t say.
“What….” She continued to stare at the card for a moment and then threw that hand up in the air and letting it slap down hard on the other hip. “I thought you were the fat one! The one with the beard and the cold, little eyes!”
Her gaze made him take another step backward, nearly sending him off the pavement. “Oh. At those meetings. No, that’s our chief legal counsel. They all have eyes like that. Wait!”
She had swung those hips toward him and turned to march away. He had already decided that if she did that, he would let her go. But he couldn’t help himself. He took three steps without any idea of what he was going to say if he caught up.
He didn’t have to say a thing. Her turn had been too violent; the loose and dripping coil of fabric sprang entirely free. His third step brought a foot down on the corner of the radical battlebanner. His fourth had him firmly on the fabric just as she noticed she was losing it. Clutching it to her, she yanked hard. He was too heavy for this to do her any good. Now she turned, not looking up, got both hands firmly on each side of the fabric and pulled as hard as she could. She did this a split second after he realized where his feet were, and stepped away.
“Oh, help!” was what she seemed to be saying as she went down, twisting to avoid concrete. It looked painful, her landing, and the banner perversely swirled up over her.
Kneeling to pull the cloth away, he found a foot coming at his face. He had just time to turn and take it on the cheek.
“Oh!” she tried to sit up, but the banner wouldn’t give her that. She flailed backward agauin, calling, “I’m sorry. I was trying…I didn’t see you there!”
“Nothing broken,” he assured her, but it had hurt, so he was not so gentle with the banner this time. One yank pulled it free of her but sent her rolling down the sidewalk and nearly tore her jacket off in the process.
They rose, both of them kicking the banner impartially. She had her hands in the jacket pockets, pulling it back on as well as pulling it tight against her posterior. Her expression was one of deep humiliation, more, he thought, than was necessary for that accidental kick. Whether she was ashamed of starting to run away, or of not running away now, he couldn’t guess.
Fortunately, the banner gave them something to talk about. “It’s quiet now.” He set a foot down hard on one end. “But maybe you’d better shoot it behind one ear to pay it safe.”
“I’ll have to wash it.” She looked over all the muddy footprints across the lettering. “It’s all we can afford. We’re not as rich as…oh, developers.”
He like that look of challenge on her face. It meant she had accepted what he did for a living and was testing his sense of humor. On reflection, though, he decided he did NOT like her expression. She’d be so much easier to deal with if she just hated him.
What answer, though, would leave him with the most options? “I don’t work at the same level as some of the big name developers on the Coasts. I believe I could afford dinner for two.”
“What does THAT mean?” She knew what it meant. She had to play for time. How could yu consider serious issues with your mind busy imagining your fingers running along a man’s collarbone? And if they meandered down the sternum, would she find hair? Her whole face pulled in: will you wait for the wretched developer to offend you and not do it yourself?
He didn’t seem to have noticed. “We could talk about things and maybe come to some…understanding. You wanted to curse out the evil developer and I, well, I wanted to poison that Peter Rabbit. But if you promise not to kick me in the face again, I promise not to slip cyanide into your soup.”
She had to smile; her neck and shoulders lost their tightness as she realized he was laughing at himself, at them both. Pleasant to find he was huma, and unpleasant too. It had been easier to snarl about mindless developers when she didn’t know they could grin.
“I never liked cyanide.”
“Arsenic is more my style, anyhow,” he told her. he bent to pick up a corner of the banner. “You know…one of those trace elements heedless developers always leave in the soil.”
She chortled, and choked. This was wrong: all wrong. He was too NICE to be one of those park-killers! She’d never hold out through dinner. He was too…she’d been attracted to men before, by a smile, a set of freckles, a nice backside. But this was the first one she’d imagined taking home to that old footed bathtub and getting him into deep sudsy….
What had he said NOW? Arsenic? Her face was redder than ever: something was making her angry. “Of course, we don’t have to talk about the park,” he said, mending roads he couldn’t see. “It would be nice if we found some common….”
Her face went as pale as it had been red. She grabbed up as muc of the banner as she could and turned to run again.
Once upon a time, a teeny tiny woman lived in a teeny tiny house with a teeny tiny cat and her dainty darling daughter who had a dainty darling dog.. The four of them loved their teeny tiny house, which was a teeny tiny walk from a teeny tiny town
One day, the teeny tiny woman put on her best teeny tiny dress and teeny tiny shoes and told her teeny tiny cat and dainty darling daughter with her dainty darling dog that they were going to the teeny tiny town to do some teeny tiny shopping.
They stopped at the teeny tiny grocery and the teeny tiny butcher shop and walked over to the teeny tiny lumberyard where the dainty darling daughter had a dainty darling chat with some strong stalwart men while her teeny tiny mother picked out some teeny tiny nails to fix the teeny tiny roof of the teeny tiny house.
On the way home, the four of them passed a teeny tiny graveyard, where the dainty darling daughter cried, “Oh, look! Look!”
A teeny tiny bony hand wearing a teeny tiny gold ring and a teeny tiny silver bracelet was lying atop a teeny tiny grave. The teeny tiny woman warned her dainty darling daughter, “Better not go near it. I have some teeny tiny experience with such things.” And so they went home to the teeny tiny house and had their teeny tiny supper. And after they had sat around a teeny tiny fire crocheting teeny tiny tea towels, everyone went off to their teeny tiny beds, the teeny tiny cat in the teeny tiny bedroom of the teeny tiny mother and the dainty darling dog in the dainty darling bedroom of the dainty darling daughter.
But the dainty darling daughter could not sleep under her dainty darling bedspread, for worrying about that teeny tiny gold ring and that teeny tiny silver bracelet, which would look so much nicer on a living dainty darling person. “And they’re just sitting outside,” thought the dainty darling daughter, “Where a bad person might come and STEAL them.”
So finally she pushed back her dainty darling bedspread and got out of her dainty darling bed. And putting her dainty darling coat over her dainty darling nightgown and slipping into her dainty darling slippers, she took a teeny tiny walk in the moonlight to the teeny tiny graveyard. She was very careful to leave the teeny tiny hand where it was, as she had heard her teeny tiny mother’s story about what had happened before, and the whole story sent dainty darling shivers up her dainty darling spine.
After admiring the teeny tiny gold ring on her dainty darling finger and the teeny tiny silver bracelet on her dainty darling wrist, the dainty darling daughter walked back to the teeny tiny house, eased open the teeny tiny door, and hurried back to her dainty darling bedroom. Soon she was asleep in her dainty darling bed, beneath the dainty darling bedspread.
But not long after she closed her dainty darling eyes and started to snore dainty darling snores, she heard a voice in her bedroom say “Give me back my bone.”
The dainty darling daughter snuggled deeper among the dainty darling bedspread and put the dainty darling pillow over her dainty darling head.
And the voice, louder now, called, “Give me back my bone!”
The dainty darling daughter reached up to pull the dainty darling pillow tighter around her dainty darling ears. “I haven’t got your old bone,” she grumbled.
The voice was quite loud now, and rather rude. “Give me back my bone!”
The dainty darling daughter threw the dainty darling pillow on the dainty darling floor and sat up. As she did so, she noticed her dainty darling dog was chewing on something. “Oh, dear me,” said the dainty darling daughter. She hadn’t even noticed that the dainty darling dog had followed her to the teeny tiny graveyard. She snatched the teeny tine bone from the dainty darling jaws and hurried to the teeny tiny door of the teeny tiny house.
“Here!” she shouted. “Take it!” And she ran back to her dainty darling bed and pulled up the dainty darling bedspread, first retrieving the dainty darling pillow from the dainty darling floor.
But she had hardly closed her dainty darling eyes when that nasty bossy voice called, “Bring me back my ring.”
“I should have known you’d be back,” muttered the dainty darling daughter, wriggling her dainty darling toes in annoyance.
“Bring me back my ring!” ordered the voice, louder now.
The dainty darling daughter sat up. “Can’t you just take it, the way you did your finger or whatever? It’s awfully late.”
“Bring me back my ring!” shouted the voice.
With a dainty darling sigh, the dainty darling daughter put her dainty darling coat on over her dainty darling nightgown, and shuffled down the teeny tiny road in her dainty darling slippers to the teeny tiny graveyard. She threw the teeny tiny ring down on the teeny tiny grave.
“There!” she said, and turned to go.
That nasty bossy voice called from the teeny tiny grave. “Give me back my bracelet.”
The dainty darling daughter had in fact left the teeny tiny bracelet behind in the dainty darling bedroom in the teeny tiny house, hoping the nasty bossy voice would forget about it. She stamped one dainty darling foot and cried, “Take it! Take anything you want, but just stop shouting!”
And that is how the dainty darling daughter found herself in the teeny tiny graveyard on a warm moonlit night, without her dainty darling slippers, without her dainty darling coat, and without her dainty darling nightgown, just as barefoot all over as the dainty darling day she was born.
Anyway, that’s the story she told her teeny tiny mother when she got back to the teeny tiny house at a teeny tiny hour of the morning.
I see by the number of views it received that my column about those who communicate on the Interwebs adding to world peace by just chilling a little and not feeling it is necessary to cry out in righteous indignation at every little thing was about as successful as a solicitation for funds to provide a home for orphan mosquitoes. So I shall give up and just join the seagulls which infest online commentary and cry out against life’s imperfections. Let’s start with postcard artists who can’t draw birds.
You may not think this is a major cause of pain and anguish in the world, but, hey, you must be one of those Luddites whose algorithms bring you nothing but bulletins on recent innovations in steam-powered bicycles. These sickly looking birds (who should be ill eagle) are everywhere in the postcard world. I am fighting to be fair about this. I will not include the two examples shown above, for example. These artists were not going for ornithological accuracy: they just wanted something looking vaguely like a rooster or a goose to make the joke. This is fair game.
This artist, too, was not out to look like a page torn from a Roger Tory Peterson field guide. His joke was about chicken scratches, and if the scratching bits are emphasized, we can all tell what the picture is going for. No complaints.
But had THIS artist ever seen a rooster before? I know, I know: he couldn’t go to Google Images and call up a picture of a rooster as reference. But gee golly whiz, was that any excuse for asking Uncle Jasper to pose with his head tipped back a little and then draw feathers on the result?
Let’s try again. Cobb Shinn here wanted to draw a cartoon duck, and succeeded. We can see what he intended.
This gag, however, is pointless unless we know the child is holding a duck. I guess we CAN see a duck…if we concentrate on the words of the joke and squint at the bird, which looks like that cousin the chicken and sparrow families don’t talk about. But we’re not going to convince that kid, who KNOWS this is a duck stand-in, a cheap duck substitute.
Because it talks, everyone assumes this is a parrot. It looks like a green cardinal, yes, but it handles just the afterjoke, and it appeared in a whole series of postcards where it comments with a wisecrack on the main gag of the card. (Besides, I have seen no cards where anyone claims he IS a parrot. He may just as well have BEEN a green cardinal.)
But no matter how much it looks like a pigeonhawk, THIS, I believe, is intended to be a parrot. (I could be wrong. Suggesting that your empty space at the family table could be filled by a parrot seems rather at odds with the folksy good humor of the image.)
And THIS artist, it is obvious, has been at great pains to draw a realistic image of…what is this thing? Is there a bread of chicken that looks like this, or is this postcard of 1908 or thereabouts evidence that the dodo was domesticated and survived unnoticed in chicken coops in the Midwest for years after it was assumed extinct?
Perhaps I am just too touchy. Perhaps I should take my own advice about not giving away to outrage over every little…. WHAT. IS. THIS? Did someone paint a parrot brown and teach it to say “Cluck Cluck?” Is the man lying in the bed trying to start an online career as a ventriloquist with a turkey puppet? Have the pigeons…. No. Enough. These are bygone birds all, drawn by cartoonists of distant generations, and there is nothing anyone can do about them. Not that THAT would ever stop any dedicated online complainer. I just think maybe I can do more good in the world by going back to learning why they crossed the road.
“They always talk about remembering.” Meadow Saffron took a double handful of flower petals and flung these after the couple moving along the sidewalk.
“It’s what we do,” Primrose told her. “They won’t forget when WE help them Do It. This one wasn’t so easy though.”
“It was fun.” Bluebell shaped a pyramid of flower petals before her, sighted along one edge, patted it flatter, and then kicked it toward the retreating couple. “I was going to tear a hole in one of the bags but SHE woon’t let me!”
“You just wanted one of those cans of oranges for your own self,” Sniffed Primrose. “I know YOU!”
“So what happens now?” demanded Sweet Pea.
Unfirom’s eyes went to the couple. “They will Do It rather later tonight, and again early in the morning.” He winced as the phronik applauded with all feet and hands. “He will be so impressed with himself that he will continue to see her, and will readily accept an invitation in November to come live with her. Under her influence, he will become more dependable at work, and move up through the ranks. His developing self-confidence will bring on more and more arguments, and after six years, he will leave her for a younger woman. Two years after that, when he learns he is dying of a cancer he left too long, he will seek her out. When he dies, she will be holding his hand.”
“But that’s so sad!” Sweet Pea had to fly to the grass and blow her nose on a French fry bag.
The angel lifted an eyebrow. “Not so sad as it would have been otherwise.”
“He dies a lot later this way,” Meadow Saffron agreed.
“And he’s…look! It’s Mollie!” Bluebell shot through the air followed by her three colleagues as their favorite poodle came up the sidewalk.
Unfirom watched them vie for seats, and then strode off through the grass. It was coming up on one of the quieter parts of the day. As various work shifts came to an end, the park would fill up again, but not many of these would be planning new phases of their romantic lives. That came more toward sunset.
He found a bench and sat down, hands on his knees, more for variation in routine than because he was tired: physically, at least. The park had been here a long time, and so had he. It had survived assorted waves of passive parkism before. He and the phronik had patrolled through all these phases until now, when things were quiet, the park seemed to him to be filled with ghosts.
Here, now, came Tom and Helen. The phronik had had to arrange a bicycle crash for them in 1965. Her left shoe hadn’t turned up for months. Donald and Linda were walking just behind them, knowing nothing about that bicycle accident in 1965, any more than Tom and Helen knew about their daughter’s mishap with that kite in 1977, which had led to her engagement to Donald. Unfirom missed Barry and Billie from the group, just to complete the group. He shuddered at the memory of what the phronik had done to Linda’s daughter’s brassiere in 1996, but it had done the trick.
Rain began to spatter the bench; the foursome hurried past the unseen angel. The shower passed quickly. Snow in winter was more of a problem. Not because of the cold, since he didn’t feel it, but Unfirom’s job was more difficult with fewer visitors, most of them too chilly to present much in the way of work. The phronik had to be kept busy with other things, like experimenting with cookies in the kitchen or throwing snowballs at angels. No one had thrown snowballs at him in his previous job. Griese was a man small children were inspired to throw snowballs at, but unfirom’s job had merely been to divert the projectiles.
Another bit of finished business strolled down the sidewalk. Unfirom glanced over his shoulder. The city had never repaired that gouge her car made in the lawn over there. The gully the phronik scooped out quickly to make her fall in the mud when she got out had taken years to refill. Meadow Saffron had won the betting on when that happened. Ghosts, all ghosts: his part in their lives came at one pivotal point. After that, their lives were usually irrelevant to the park, and vice versa.
Dusk came on reasonably dry. Cars spat up a fine spray as they sped past a little too fast on the way home, but the park was dry enough for a gentle stroll. Unfirom felt a shiver of premonition. When the air was this fresh and the sunset this golden, there could be eight to ten couples to attend to in ten minutes.
The angel rose: time to alert the troops again. Pity he couldn’t send them instructions telepathically: then he wouldn’t need to witness whatever devilry they were up to.
Booty Burgers had drifted into a clump along the fence of the softball diamond: no phronik were among these. They were not to be found under one of the benches at the playground, where fudgesicle wrappers tended to congregate. His mouth tightened, but a splash made him nod, and turn. Another splash drew him to a musical mud puddle.
“Arthur had a brainstorm for the telegraph
That cut the message-sending time to less than half;
He put it on the market; it was doing well
Until he heard from Alexander Graham Bell.
Percolator, coffeemaker,
Subaru and Studebaker:
All ya got is all yer gonna get,
Waddya bet?”
Primrose was squatting in the muddy water, shaking her situpon to the left and right. “That wasn’t refined at all,” she told Bluebell. “Start over.”
“Think yours is better?” Bluebell raised on her nose and then her hips. A face had been painted from one side of these to the other, using mud. “I could do a better mustache with both hands tied behind y back!”
“I’ll get some string and we’ll try that,” Primrose promised.
Sweet Pea screeched “Ooooh! That tickles!”
“Stand still!” Meadow Saffron commanded. “You want the bunny to have crooked ears?” She drew long lines of mud up her partner’s back.
“You could make it a lop-eared bunny,” Sweet Pea pointed out.
“Too late now.” Meadow Saffron stooped for another double handful of mud. “If the bunny had lopped-over ears, I’d need to draw ‘em on your legs.”
“Ooh, do both!” Sweet Pea clasped her hands, which were also full of mud. “Then he can choose which ears he wants to wear every morning!”
“Why? Don’t you want him to have color in his cheeks?”
“Ahem,” said the angel.
Four faces tipped up to gaze upon him, but not the faces he had been looking to attract. “The sun is starting down,” he sighed.
Sweet Pea added some mud to the face Meadow Saffron had aimed at Unfirom. “Did you find us some more to play with?”
“Not yet,” the angel admitted. “But it is getting to be that time. We may each have t be on the alert for couples.” As the faces pointed at him shook left and right in four negative responses, he added, “As well as people with their evening choices from Booty Burger.”
“I see a people!” squeaked Sweet Pea, one muddy finger pointed at alone woman. “What do I win?”
“Maybe we’ll all make sure your bunny has rosy cheeks,” said Meadow Saffron. “Just stand still, why don’t you?”
“She did see somebody,” Primrose pointed out. “A nice somebody.”
The head of the forces marshalled to save the park (and, today, the only one of those forces to show up) was moving across the grass, her damp banner wrapped around her like a long cloak. Her eyes were turned up, as if expecting more rain.
“I like her,” said Sweet Pea. “She’s cushy.”
Bluebell nodded. “I bet she has dimples.”
“I bet she has dimples on her dimples,” said Meadow Saffron.
“That’s boring,” Bluebell told her. “She needs hands on her dimples.”
Unfirom watched the protestor spread her banner out on a bench, and then sit down on a dry part of it. “Would you like her as much if she were working for the other side?”
“I would,” said Bluebell. “But I’d keep my mouth shut about it.”
“There’s a first time for everything,” said Primrose, and jumped away from the slap aimed at her lower face.
“I even think HE’S cute,” Bluebell went on, pointing to the developer. “And he’s the one who wants to take away the swings and the sandbox and the Booty Burger wrappers with pickles in ‘em.”
The man stopped at a trash bin to unwrap his ice cream sandwich and drop the wrapper inside. “I wonder if he‘s got dimples,” said Primrose.
“Sometimes,” said Meadow Saffron, “It’s the ones you’d never suspect. Remember that wrestler from the high school?”
Sweet Pea jumped up and down, her bunny face alternately smiling and frowning as it bobbled. “I know, I know, I know!”
“So do I.” Primrose tipped her head to one side. “He was the one who kept moving his hat so he wouldn’t sunburn his….”
“No no no!” Sweet Pea was pointing straight ahead of her as she went on jumping. “Why don’t we make THEM fall in love next?”
Her fellow phronik were much struck by this. “They’d make a cute couple,” said primrose, wiping the mud from her hand with her nose. “Well, half of them would.”
Bluebell flew up toward the angel’s face. “Does he have somebody better to Do It with?”
“No,” said Unfirom. “His work schedule allows little time for a social life. However….”
“Well, let’s give him one, then,” said Meadow Saffron. Sweet Pea giggled
Bluebell grabbed up two handsful of mud and splopped them together to make a geyser. “Maybe we could get ‘em to Do It right here!”
“He couldn’t call it a passive park then,” said Primrose.
“Yeah,” Bluebell replied, joining her in a muddy high five. “And we’d find out about his dimples!”
“Anyways,” said Sweet Pea, “He’d be in love with her so much, he woon’t want to ruin the park where he met her!”
“Can you be sure it wouldn’t work the other way?” inquired the angel, his voice hinting at complete lack of faith in the plans of phronik. “She could be so in love with him that she gives up her crusade, and helps him implement the passive park.”
Sweet Pera whipped around. “Oh, she’d never! Would she?”
“We shall never know. Doing It is not part of their mutual destinies.”
Bluebell shook a finger at his nose. “Say, listen, Chuckles. If you see all that destiny, why don’t you just TELL us what’s going to happen to the park?”
“There are circumstances not yet determined.” The faintest touch of bitterness tinged the angel’s voice. “In any case, an angel can’t know everything.”
“Could’ve fooled us, the way you talk,” grumbled Meadow Saffron.
“In any case,” he informed them, “We have more pressing duties. As they finish eating and stroll out to enjoy the sunset, couples will be coming to the park. We will all need to keep watch for those more romantically inclined than others, so that you can let me know. If I identify such a couple first, I’ll need you to be ready for a summons, and not worrying about couples who are not your problem.”
The phronik saluted their commander with kissy faces—again with the wrong faces—and then shot up into the sky.
“I’ll go this way!”
“You went this way last time! I’m going this way!”
“Well, okay. If you’re going to be that way.”
“No, I’m going to be this way!”
Four tiny muddy bodies zipped out of sight. After half a minute, they had reunited on a side of the fieldhouse roof where the angel could not see them.
“Who’s he think he is, telling us what to do?” demanded Bluebell.
“The one who tells us what to do,” replied Primrose.
“Let’s work on them,” said Meadow Saffron. “It’ll work if it’s all four of us. And if we save the park without HIM, maybe we’ll get to be angels ourselves!”
“Angels never get to eat French fries.” Sweet Pea was peeking over the edge of the roof at the protestor on the bench. “He told us so.”
“Okay,” said Bluebell, hunkering down to draw a diagram which had nothing to do with the matter on a roof tile. “Let’s make ‘em do it right here in public, where everybody can see. That way we can save the park but nobody will make us angels for it.”
Sweet Pea bounced with approval. “And we might make him fall so much in love he drops his ice creams!”
I do not have all that many postcards in my inventory which feature rats. This is not something I ever expected to have to apologize for, but in my most recent column, in which I told the thrilling tale of my courage in the face of a nonexistent rat, I used as illustration a postcard featuring mice. And I was called out for this inaccuracy by one of the perhaps three people who actually read this exploit from the days of my youth. (Maybe I should have started with the story of the bat. Or the curlew: now THAT was a tale of someone with the courage to simply retreat to a neutral corner and allow nature to…where were we?)
Anyhow, I DO have lots of postcards which involve mice, and it occurs to me that I have not yet considered the attitude of our ancestors and their postcard cartoonists to this small visitor known to people of city and farm. (I KNOW that guy’s going to point out that the brown mouse of the countryside is quite separate from the gray mouse seen in more urban areas. Well, if it makes him a loyal reader to criticize my omissions, it counts as a hit in the analytics.)
Leaving aside for now the natural opposition of cats and mice, which we can always save for another blog, the most usual nemesis of the mouse in the house is the lady of said house. I may have that backward. As we see from these examples, the mouse is actually the nemesis of the resident female. Women were considered especially susceptible to attacks by mice back in the day because they had long dresses and plentiful underskirts, which meant that if a mouse took refuge somewhere in the folds, there was no telling how far it might go. Frantic dancing with wild shaking of skirts was the only remedy, and if that did not chase the intruder away, one might be faced by the necessity to undress (which would involve putting your hands among folds of cloth where a mouse—with teeth—might be lurking.)
So the natural clash was real, and serious, and had nothing to do with a cartoonist knowing that showing a lady’s ankles as she pulled her skirts out of the way would sell a lot of postcards.
But a mouse in the house had a life of its own, and even when not interacting with the human foe, had a tale of its own. (Yeah, but the cartoonist used it first.)
Left to its own devices, the mouse could be romantic, even musical, as it ravened through stored and unwatched food around the place.
Romance led to marriage, apparently. (And to expanded waistlines. Do you think she’s worried about the trap, or about what cheese is said to do to the blood pressure of the common house mouse?)
And, eventually, families to support, and a cozy little home where a worried mouse could rest his sole. (All right, I’ll stop now. By the way, if that fan of mine who likes to criticize is worried about it, that title at the top is a salute to animated cartoon cat Mr. Jinks, who famously hated meeses to pieces. No data on whether this influenced the makers of Reese’s pieces. The whole influence of mice on our culture deserves further…oh, I’m going to need to do another blog, aren’t I? Not only have we not discussed cats, but there are some animated mice—one in particular—whose influence…. Okay, shutting my trap.)
I have a question for you comic book experts out there. I did my time in the world of comics fandom, but that was back in the days when I could buy a boxful of new comics for about twenty bucks. No that was NOT in the days when they were a dime. I’m not quite that….
Anyway, what I wanted to ask is “Are there any cases of a superhero who acquired those special powers after the age of, oh, sixty or so?” I assume there may have been occasional gimmicks and gags where an innocent bystander with white hair temporarily achieved the power of invisibility or flight. But is there any chance of suddenly becoming a cover feature on a comic book after a certain…. Asking for a friend.
I don’t need any further powers myself, you understand. I am a blogger. I became a blogger during my years working with books, a period when I exposed my super powers moving boxes of books while successfully concealing my secret identity as a librarian with a genuine Master’s degree in the subject. This entitles me to hang out at eh bar after hours with Batman or the Hulk, discussing that time I carried a box of foreign editions of Playboy which weighed too much to be mailed or shipped. (For repacking, the man in charge of the scales took out half the magazines and after THAT, the box weighed 120 pounds.) I believe Batgirl started her days in the comics as a demure librarian (glasses and all), but did SHE ever have to cross a large room in three seconds flat to catch a bookcase someone had modified so they could get two more books on each shelf? I perfected a talent for leaping stacks of LPs in a single bound. As I was saying to Captain America over Shirley Temples at the….
What’s that, mortal? Did I ever rescue a damsel in distress? I shall ignore your attempts at bygone sexist stereotypes and answer, with a dignity becoming to those of us who change our clothes in telephone booths, “Why, yes. Yes, I did.”
No railroad tracks were involved. (Good thing, too: I never was good at knots.) I was dealing with a donation where someone had put an entire set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in one box when the phone rang. It was a call from my colleagues in the public part of the building. “Can you come to the bookstore and help us with something?”
Anything was better than dealing with one more Britannica (some of my most unbelievable exploits involved actually occasionally selling one of these, but no one ever believes THOSE stories.) So I trotted up to the A.C. McClurg Bookstore, where the ladies were unboxing a shipment of new books. THEY never dealt in 1945 editions of World Book, so I wondered what the problem was.
“Could you open this book?”
The manager handed me a nice shiny book, complete with crisp dust jacket. Then she and the assistant manager backed off five steps. “It’s probably nothing,” said the manager. “But if you….”
I had not seen it at first, but I sure did now. Extending from the spine was a long gray tapered object. Imagine a rat’s tail. Because that’s what the three of us were imagining.
“It HAS to be glue from the binding,” the assistant manager said. “Just extra glue that got stretched out and wasn’t cut off.”
“You’re right,” I said. But I didn’t open the book. Any one of the three of us could have taken hold of the tail, of course. I have no REAL data on the question, but a length of dried glue should NOT feel like an animal’s tail. I cleared my throat, shook my shoulders, and flexed my fingers over the cover.
“Just a minute,” I was told. “Could you open it over THERE?”
Of course a superhero must face the big villains alone. Book, and inhabitant, in hand, I retired to a neutral corner. Come on, I told myself. No way could a rat be pressed flat enough to….
I have no data on that, either. It turned out to be a thick strand of glue from the binding, just as we had all assumed. We laughed, and then I turned over the book and went back to my encyclopedias, secure in the knowledge that the hero had saved the day. (AND without having to face down an actual rat, which might have resulted in a completely different ending.)
Anna set her groceries down on the sidewalk first, and then let herself thump down on the bench. She swept the back of one hand across her eyes. Then she leaned back and crossed her ankles in front of her.
Anna Eleanor, she told herself, it’s a food thing your parents aren’t around to see you now. They named you after that First Lady so you’d grow up to be the first lady president.
She shook her hair out behind her; maybe she’d just sit here until it was mostly dry again. It was one of the nice things about unemployment: no need to hurry anywhere.
Without any real warning, the city had up and eliminated her entire department, director to receptionist. Never mind that no one else in the government had the expertise, the experience, or the connections to fill in for the missing employees. Getting the job done was not important in an election year: the point was to eliminate expensive workers and cut the deficit.
Well, she’d be all right. Things might get tight, but there’d be another job once the voting was done. She had her bank account to keep her warm. Rent, electricity, and telephone could be covered for about a year. And if she restricted expensive cuts of meat (anything not ground up) tpo her birthday and holidays, there should be no problem at all.
She glanced at the bags. Why, right here she had a week’s supply of Ramen and tubes of off-brand biscuits, six for a dollar. There was rice, pasta, and, as a special treat, a can of pork and beans. Between rice and Creamettes, that can could probably be stretched to two or three meals. But maybe she wouldn’t stretch it. You needed something extravagant for at least one meal, to keep up morale.
What to choose for supper tonight? Which of these wild treats…. Never mind, Anna Eleanor, she told herself, letting the scowl smooth from her face. Just lean back and let your hair dry. Important to keep a cool head.
Head tipped back, she didn’t see Shannon coming along the concrete. Shannon had seen her, but was paying no attention. His mind was busily working out how Chris pointing out mathematical errors in his work meant, really, that Chris was after his job. The problem was that, the way his brain worked, this had easily moved to Chris leading police to his apartment with a search warrant to make sure Shannon wasn’t smuggling office supplies out at the end of the work day.
Shannon shook his head. Had to break that habit. With little or no provocation, he could build a chance encounter with a stranger into a robbery at the grocery store, with himself as the hero, ripping the head off the stranger with the useless gun. He could as easily develop a story that began with his own arrest for jaywalking by the stranger with the hidden badge and ended with suicide in prison, a place he imagined was not ideal for a convict named Shannon.
He glanced up. Maybe it was the weather. A thunderstorm was on the way: his animal senses told him so. Those same animal instincts had convinced him to leave early today., claiming he was sick. He WAS sick. Sometimes it got so crowded in there that a man with such a highly developed animal nature couldn’t breathe. There were more people in the department every day: one day they’d discover there wasn’t enough work for them all and start trimming the dead wood. Chris would see to it that highly sensitive animal men who left work early would be the first to go.
He checked the clouds again; his nostrils told him the storm was nigh. It would be a nasty one, too. He’d have to double bolt the doors when he got home, so the lightning didn’t force him outdoors once the transformation had taken place.
While eyes were pointed up, a bag of groceries which had been sitting quietly, minding its own business, tipped forward. Flat packages of Ramen noodles rattled across the sidewalk, and a can of pork and beans rolled toward Shannon’s feet.
Halfway there, it seemed to catch on a crack in the concrete and roll on into the grass, bumping aside a can of mandarin oranges. This bounced a cylinder of cheap biscuits toward him.
“Oh, prunes!” The woman on the bench bent forward to gather in the noodle packages. Shannon, bending automatically, paid more attention to the biscuits than to their owner. He took a step back when he did see her. The clear complexion and bland face repelled him at once. She would have a particularly cruel smile. Women with cheeks like that always did.
He stood with the can of biscuits clutched in his hands. Now what? He didn’t want to have to talk to her, but he wasn’t going to walk away with her biscuits. She’d scream for the [police—he knew she would—and with that jaywalking charge already on his record…no, wait. That hadn’t happened, had it.
Anna looked up at the young man frowning at her biscuits. The sidewalk here was very dirty, of course: nice of him to check whether the tin had broken at the Easy-Open Seam. Most men his age would never think of things like that.
“I’m sure it’s all right,” she told him. “I don’t know what made everything fall all out that way.” Anna stood the bag up and piled the noodles inside, and then twisted it toward him so he could drop in the biscuits.
Shannon hesitated for a long time, and then sat down on the bench to slide the cylinder into the opening. “Is….” He had to lick his lips to go on. “Is that all there is?”
“I think so.”
The woman bent farther over the bag, presenting the back of her head to him. Shannon shuddered and turned away, checking the grass. “Oh! Here’s some oranges!”
Shoving his hand down to pick up the can, he rammed his thumb against the rim of another, heavily concealed by bending grass. With his luck, this can was old and rusty, and he’d die now of tetanus. With one thumb in his mouth, he brushed back grass with the other and spotted the familiar, not at all dirty, label of a can of pork and beans.
Anna, still rearranging things in the bag, exclaimed, “Oh, thank you!” He WAS a thoughtful young man. Poor fellow: anyone looking at him could see there was no one to think of HIM. His haircut was very bad, and the cuffs of that dress shirt were frayed to the point of dilapidation. He smelled far too strongly of Ivory, too.
She pushed the mandarin oranges down among the other groceries. “That bag’s just about full,” he said.
“Oh, that’s a sure sign,” she said, giving the groceries another shift. He was very young. She shrugged. Not everybody could be the right generation: he looked like one of those boys who always assumed an electric guitar and a stage would be their destiny, only to wind up working in an office. He just hadn’t learned yet how to fit into the civilized world. The civilized world had a way of teaching you, though.
Shannon held his breath until she sat back again. Then he saw her eyes go to his hands.
“Here’s another.” Keeping his eyes on her at all times, he set the pork and beans can on top of the other groceries. He could feel himself turning red, seeing in her eyes she thought he’d planned to steal her beans. Her face showed how superior she felt to the rest of the world. She looked the perfect image of his third grade teacher, the one with the paddle, who liked to hear little boyus scream. (His mother told him what he had seen was a clipboard. All these women worked together.) Twenty years gone, and he could still see those cruel eyes, and hear her voice saying, “Hush, Shannon. You’re making a show of yourself.”
Maybe it was time to make a show of himself. He’d been quiet, restraining his wolf persona for so long. Maybe the time had come to lope under the full moon, to let the werewolf slake its thirst in its victims’ blood. She could be the first.
“Well, now. What’s the problem here?”
Perhaps the cans were too heavy for the noodles to support: in any case, the bag tipped again before either pair of hands could stop it. The can of beans, particularly, was active, seeming to jump and roll for the street. Shannon went after it, but his left foot found the can of mandarin oranges. Flailing with the recaptured beans, he just missed slamming the can between her eyes.
“Are you all right?” she asked him. He took a few seconds to sit square on the bench again: Anna hoped he hadn’t twisted an ankle. He didn’t answer. Of course not: no man would admit he was hurt. His face was just like Colly, who had started as her doctor at that clinic in California, only to substitute himself for her other addictions and wind up addicted himself. He’d jumped in front of a train. She closed her eyes for a moment.
The young man rose and she opened her eyes to see him walk, without any sign of a limp, toward the packages of noodles, which had managed to fall in the shape of a little hut, with rwo walls and a roof. He touched the roof and the walls fell in, making him jump back.
“Bug,” he growled, sitting down again. “Bit my leg.”
She studied him as he bent farther forward to retrieve some more Ramen. “You know that’s the way trouble starts, Anna Eleanor,” she told herself. But her life was probably as full of trouble now as it could get, and he did seem to be built pretty much along the lines of Dr. Colly. From what she could see at this angle.
She had attracted a lot of attention from young and slow-moving types like this young man, after she deteriorated to California from dancing in Las Vegas. In Las Vegas it had been older men and some very nice suppers, and plenty of money for artificial life sweeteners. California’s men, not often as soft-spoken as this specimen, didn’t offer supper. And eventually one had to admit one wasn’t up to scandalous scanties on the stage and become an aging city employee. They talked about rehab these days as if it was like having the flu, but in those days it had been one step above…. An aging city employee. Former city employee.
“Where’d those biscuits go now?” the young man growled, showing himself to be intriguingly limber as he nearly stuck his head right under the bench to look.
Anna shrugged. Once you got old enough that nobody cared what you did, nobody cared to do it with you.
Shannon spotted the wretched biscuits, just beyond the reach of his fingers. Every time he even brushed it with his fingers it rolled back another half inch. He was getting confused: was he going to hit the old woman with the biscuits or hit the biscuits with the old woman? Which was making him madder?
He glanced back at her. Her expression was intent; she was plotting something. His third grade teacher had worn just that face when she put the curse on him, extending his suffering outside her classroom, so he would undergo the transformation every full moon. “I can hear you howl, even when we’re far apart,” was what she’d been thinking, on that last day of third grade, even though all she’d SAID was “Have a good summer.”
Ah! His fingers curled around the biscuit cylinder. Just at that moment, it somehow slid sideways. Shannon extended further, and found himself at the very end of the bench and about to fall facefirst in the scraggly grass. He was shifting his feet when he felt a tug on his belt. This startled him into a leap. He sat down hard on the sidewalk.
“I’m sorry,” said the old witch. “I thought I could hang on.”
Likely story, Shannon thought, but even as he growled his displeasure, his manners slipped in to gloss over the wolf, as usual. “Oh, that’s just what WOULD happen, with my luck. Someone put a curse on those biscuits.”
“I know what you mean.” She extended a hand, which he ignored. “Once your luck starts downhill, it keeps going, and faster.”
“True.” Shannon put a hand down to push himself up and squashed a box of Jell-0 pudding. “Drat!”
Anna Eleanor rolled her eyes, thinking, “And such manners! Would you have said ‘drat’ when you were his age, Anna Eleanor?” She leaned forward to peer at the box. “I don’t think you broke it.”
“I hope not.” Shannon checked the crumpled box. “Shame to waste the tapioca.”
“That’s for my birthday,” she said. “It’s always been my favorite.”
The box wasn’t leaking as Shannon picked it up. “I always loaded up at the college cafeteria. Especially when they put the pudding from the night before out at breakfast. It was good and thick by then.”
“The wonder is how it makes such a thick pudding and such a thin meatloaf.”
Shannon, his eyes wide, looked up from the grocery bag, his hand poised above it. “Oh, you don’t add the pudding,” she assured him. “Just loose tapioca.”
“I know that.” His eyes were still bulging. “I just never met anyone outside my own family who made that.”
“Really?” She sat back. “Me neither. You’d think we both came to the park through the Psychic Pals Congregation.”
“An accident of fate.” He put the pudding into the bag.
Her head tipped to the side. “Can you have an accident of fate? If something’s fated, can there be an accident?”
Shannon’s lips tightened; she was correcting him. Just as well. If they’d gone on discussing food they had in common, he might have found himself liking someone he hated. That was fate, surely: the first woman he’d found who could talk about useful things, like tapioca, and she was the utter opposite of his ideal. He’d been looking all this time for a short, slender young thing with big eyes and wispy hair across the back of her neck, and what he found to talk to was an old schoolteacher, half a witch. That was why he was still even here, probably: she’d put a spell on him.
“When they came out with chocolate tapioca pudding, I tried that,” she chattered on pretending not to notice he’d been frozen to the grass by black magic. “Waste of time. Gilding the lily.”
Shannon’s agreement was out before he could stop it. “Some people put cherry pie filling on top. Makes you wonder why people who hate tapioca pudding don’t just eat something else.”
An intelligent boy, she thought: a bright boy. She hadn’t found anyone who’d talk this way since Dr. Colly. The folks at the store used to talk food, but nowadays they’d hire anybody who’d run a box across a scanner for minimum wage. Only the butcher was required to know anything, and she couldn’t afford to hang around his counter these days. Oh, Anna Eleanor, couldn’t you be a dozen years younger? Of course, you’d probably be named Jacqueline.
“I know what you mean,” she told him. “It’s like all those people who can’t cook rhubarb without adding strawberries or marshmallows or something.”
His mouth flopped open again. “Rhubarb! I can’t find rhubarb to buy anywhere! Unless that’s what’s growing in the planters at Booty Burger. I keep thinking I should cut some and find out. But if I make a poison pie, that’s just wasting the lard for the crust.”
“Only lard for pie crust.” Anna sat back. It was years ago, of course, when a young man who knew anything about baking was considered uninterested in women, but nowadays…. Oh, Anna Eleanor what difference does it make? Whether he’s interested in men, women, or cabbages, it’s nothing to do with you.
“Easier to just make the pudding.” Her head bent over the bag of groceries, checking the arrangement.
“If it is rhubarb, it’s just going to waste,” he said, waving a hand in the general direction of the brger joint. “I could make the pie and the pudding, and have both on the same day.”
“That would be a red-letter day.”
Shannon studied the back of her head. She had no idea how red this red-letter day would be. Her cunning in keeping him here would backfire. He would just hold her in conversation as well, until he decided where to start.
“What would you pick for the main course? Or is two desserts enough?”
“I don’t think they’d go together.” Distracted, Shannon considered the question. “Pizza? Fried chicken? Steak? I don’t know. With those to follow, I could make do with a Booty Deluxe.”
“Any of that sounds good.” She patted her groceries.
She did seem a nice person…for a wicked witch and torturer of small children. But this was not enough to defeat his wolf nature. Whatever she said, she had to face retribution. He would have hius revenge on his third grade teacher, since if she wasn’t dead by now, she must surely be immortal, and thus as untouchable as always. This witch would be her reprsentative. He would play her body like a drum, rising in bloody crescendo.
He turned wolf eyes to look for a weapon. None of the big cans was within reach, but perhaps he could offer to haul her groceries for her. Or maybe his hands would do. The old lady looked tough, but the wolf was tougher. If he could keep an eye on her until dusk, the wolf would take charge.
“I can’t remember the last supper I didn’t make myself.” She shifted the cans below the Ramen and pudding, probably reading his mind about the heavy can of beans.
Shannon leaned in. “Sometimes I make my own supper.” Tonight, he did not add, I’ll be feasting on your life’s blood, spurting from your torn throat.
“Tiresome, cooking for one.”
“Supper usually takes about ten minutes.” Now. Right now. Before she could say anything more to his human side. Time to act. Be like the wolf: make your decision and act on it. He rose from the ground, a looming shadow.
Oh, he was so tall. Anna sighed. “Well, I’d best be going, too. Thanks for helping.”
Taking the handles, she rose, turning her back on her helper. Forget him, Anna Eleanor: you were a fool even trying. That line about cooking for one was old and musty. He’s no more interested in you than he is in this can of pork and beans. He was just a polite young man; he’d have done the same thing for his grandmother.
Shannon studied her neck, picking a place to take hold. He and his chosen victim were both too deep in thought to realize one can of mandarin oranges was still lurking in a clump of weeds. One of Anna’s footsteps must have shifted the plants enough for it to roll onto the sidewalk.
“Wowp!”
Arms flailing, her groceries bouncing everywhere, she went flopping backward. Shannon, reaching for her neck, could not get his arms out of the way before she fell into them. He staggered backward under the soft, warm weight. She smelled of some exotic scent which made him think, for some reason, of pink bathrooms with ruffled curtains.
She turned her head up, her hair tickling the underside of his chin. “Well, you’re just being helpful all over the place!” She thumped one fist softly against his chest. “Lucky thing you keep your muscles so hard. I’m heavier than a bag of pudding.”
Shannon had no idea what to do now. Now that he had her in his clutches, and could easily hurl her to the sidewalk to rip off her arms and legs, that all seemed kind of drastic. That she should throw herself into this fatal trap was unexpected; that she should pay him a compliment while she was there stunned him.
“Well.” He fought to bring back the wolf. He wanted to growl “With luck you won’t find out how hard” but it occurred to him that this wording could be misconstrued. But that was good, wasn’t it? If he really offended her, she might show her true nature.
Anna was in no hurry to extricate herself, but she could see no future in this conversation. Pulling herself upright, she bent over to snatch up the mandarin oranges and grab at the disobedient bag nearest her. It was not an accident that she did not step forward, so that she rubbed against him as she worked.
She hoped she was smiling and not leering. “Why not come with me so I could make you something to eat?”
Shannon shivered. Something about that maternal smile was sapping his wolf strength; he almost said he would come. He looked vainly into the sky for a full moon.
She went on smiling. He forced his mind back to his third grade teacher, and her smile as she waved goodbye at the end of that hideous year. Fake smile, fake smile, as if he didn’t know that as soon as he was out of sight she would put the mark of the wolf on him.
And he still couldn’t think of her name. Maybe it had been his SECOND grade teacher.
“It would be a supper you don’t have to buy,” she told him. “And you could…..” No, Anna Eleanor: he’s the timid sort. That line about bringing you breakfast will scare him away. And isn’t all that original.
“I….”
“I bet you’d like something that lasted more than ten minutes.” Anna Eleanor you are completely out of your tree! She caught up more of the groceries. What are you going to feed him, anyhow? Maybe…well, no, maybe NOT the pork and beans.
“Well, I….” She studied her smile. Her mind was too devious for a simple wolf; he couldn’t read what she was planning. “I could…I’d…have to…leave early. I…I can be…dangerous after dark.:
“I look forward to it.” She smiled into his eyes, and set the first bag on the bench, so he could pick it up, which would leave her a hand free to take his. This hand was good and solid, too, if a little damp. And suddenly he didn’t smell nearly so much of ivory.
He pulled back, his eyes narrowing. “How can I remember you already? We just met.”
‘Remember you?” she demanded at the same time. “You never lived in California, did you?”
They stared at each other, laughed, and set off down the sidewalk.
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