Pick o' the Day: Oh, Montana! (Chapter 2 - The Abduction)

     The car rolled to a stop in front of a pretty little house in an elegant-looking neighborhood in the old part of town.  "This is where I live," said Evangeline as she turned off the engine.  "And this is where you are going to live, too.  At least until we find your family."  She opened the passenger-side door and helped Hank out. Taking his hand, she led him up the curving sidewalk to the front door, and after unlocking it, she insisted that he go in first.  As he stepped in, he was instantly struck by the warmth and beauty of the room.  The walls were covered by what looked like happy family pictures, interesting pieces of artwork, and a number of religious icons.  The furniture looked cushy and comfortable, and the air within the room smelled like flowers.
     "Your home is beautiful, Evangeline," marveled Hank.
     "Our home," she corrected him.  She took the paper sack of his belongings from his hands and set them on a table.  "Come on, let me show you around!"  He followed her down a hallway, and she showed him into a bedroom where she said he was going to be sleeping.  Hank gaped at the huge queen-sized bed covered with a thick, hand-made quilt and an enormous pile of purple pillows.  Two solidly-built nightstands topped with reading lamps flanked the intricately-carved wooden headboard.  A huge matching dresser and mirror took up most of a side wall.  "This has always been my guest room, and now it will be your room, Hank," she said.  "Do you like it?"
     "Oh, no Evangeline.  This is too nice.  I'd be happy just sleeping on the sofa."
     "Don't be silly," she giggled.  She then led him further down the hall and showed him the bathroom.  Hank thought it really smelled nice in there, and she said it was probably because of the "po-pur-ee".  He had no idea what she was talking about, but he didn't ask for clarification.  At the far end of the hall was her bedroom, which was just as nice and pretty as his room.    
     They walked from there back to the living room, through a dining area, and into a neat-as-a-pin kitchen.  "Have you eaten anything today, Hank?" she asked with a look of concern on her face.  "Um, not really," he responded.  The scary look on her face reappeared for a moment, but it then dissolved into a tender smile.  "Sit down here.  I'm going to cook you something."  Hank watched in awe as Evangeline got to work.  Her hands seemed to fly as pots and pans and spices came out of the cupboards, and within minutes the kitchen was filled with warm and delicious aromas.  Before he knew it, a couple of steaming hot, buttered tortillas and a tall glass of cold milk were set before him so that he had something to tide him over until the rest of the food was done.
     As she cooked, she told him about how her mother and father and brothers and sisters all lived in California, and how she always wanted to come back to live in this city, and how as soon as she was able to do it, she did.  She told him how she had searched for him and had actually found his old family home, but she discovered that an Indian family lived there, and they claimed not to know where the previous owners had moved to.
     "What?  You found my old house?  Really?"  Hank almost choked on his tortilla.  Like a blurry TV picture that suddenly came into focus, Hank could see the old house in his mind: faded light-green siding with even-more-faded and peeling dark-green trim around all the windows and doors.  A leaky roof.  A decrepit door on one side that led to an eerily dark and dank dirt-walled cellar where his mother liked to store the hundred-pound gunny sack of potatoes.  (Oh, did Hank ever hate it when his mother ordered him to go down there and get a few potatoes for their supper!  Each time he had to do it, he was sure he would be murdered by a ghost or a monster or a giant snake or something, but she didn't care about that and sent him anyway!  Of course, the creaky, wooden-plank stairs were covered with spider webs, and there was only a single, naked light bulb to provide a little light once he got to the bottom, and it could only be turned on by pulling a chain that he had to grope around for in the pitch darkness...)
     "Hank!  Are you okay?"
     Hank shook himself out of the vivid (and slightly horrifying) memory and looked up at Evangeline.  "I just remembered that house!  And what it was like.  It seems like a long time since I've lived there.  It's an old memory."  The puzzled look on his face changed to a smile, and he added, "But at least it's a real memory.  Maybe the rest will come back to me soon."
     "I know it will.  You'll just have to be patient is all."  She set a heaping plateful of hot food in front of him.  The plate contained a big helping of fried potatoes, four strips of bacon, three fried eggs (over medium), a scoop of refried beans, and two more freshly-made tortillas.  "I hope you don't mind breakfast for dinner!"
     "I don't mind at all.  This is wonderful," said Hank.  He ate and ate until he could eat no more.  Evangeline ate as well, and they both talked and laughed until it was nearly midnight.
     "My goodness!  I didn't know it was getting so late!  We have to get you to bed!"  She helped him up and escorted him to his room.  "Tomorrow I'm going to take you shopping for some new clothes.  But for now, you'll find some pajamas and a robe in that drawer.  Toothbrush, toothpaste, and some other things are in the bathroom.  Promise me you'll let me know if there is anything else you need."  He told her he would, and after a quick embrace, she kissed him on the cheek and went to her own room.  Hank closed the door and sat down on the bed.  He leaned back on the pile of pillows and closed his eyes.
     When morning came, Hank discovered he hadn't moved all night.  "I guess I was tired," he muttered as he got up and stretched.  He was still wearing his train engineer bib overalls and red union suit, an outfit that mystified him to no end.  He hadn't a clue as to why such old-fashioned clothes seemed to be all he had, for he certainly would not have chosen them for himself.  But Evangeline had told him she would take him to buy some clothes today, so he would only have to wear them for a few more hours.  He pulled on his huaraches and quietly opened his bedroom door.  It was early, and Evangeline was still asleep, so Hank tiptoed to the bathroom to wash.  He then walked quietly to the living room to sit down and wait for her to wake up.
     There he saw an overstuffed recliner that looked inviting, so he carefully sat down in it and kicked up his feet.  To his left was a lamp sitting on top of an elegant wooden end table, and directly beneath the lamp sat a boxed set of books.  Feeling slightly bored, Hank snapped-on the lamp and took one of the books into his hands.  It seemed to be the first book in a series, and it was entitled Little Evie of Barrio Caballo Blanco.  And the author's name was Evangeline Martinez!  Hank's jaw dropped.  He turned his head to read the spines of the other books in the box:  Little Evie Goes to School, Little Evie in the Big City, and the last one, Little Evie's Lost Love.  Hank's jaw was still in the open position as he quickly reached for the last title.  The cover showed a beautiful middle-school-aged girl with long brown hair roller-skating hand-in-hand with a blond and curly-haired boy of the same age.  "That's us!" Hank thought with a surge of excitement.
    He put the book down and looked around the room.  Evangeline was an author, and a very successful one at that!  "Wow," he thought.  "That is really... wow!"  He had never met a real author before.  And here he was, in the home of a famous one, and he had been in love with her for years and years.  And he felt very much loved by her as well.  "That is really cool," he said aloud to himself, and he carefully put the books back into the box.  He wanted very much to read the entire series, but he thought he had better wait and talk to Evangeline about it first.  Maybe she knew where he could buy his own set, and maybe she would even autograph it for him if he asked.
     Hank felt better than he had in a long time, but his legs felt like they needed to be stretched, so he decided a short walk around the neighborhood wouldn't do him any harm.  Stepping out into the chill winter morning, he instantly felt invigorated.  He breathed the crisp air into his lungs, and it seemed to him that it smelled and tasted like snow (though snow was extremely rare in that part of the country).  He scanned the neighborhood left to right.  It was pretty much deserted except for one car that was parked facing the wrong direction a little ways down the street.  That was the way Hank decided to go, figuring that maybe he could take a quick walk around the block and then get back into the house before he got too cold.
     As he approached the car, he noticed there was someone in it, sitting behind the steering wheel.  The closer he got, the more he could make out that it was a man, an old man, stubbly-faced, with wild-looking, snow-white hair and eyebrows that were completely out of control, and he appeared to be either dead or sleeping.  His head was back, his eyes were closed, and his mouth was open.  The driver's side window was down slightly, and Hank could hear no sound coming from inside.  He continued walking past the car, but something about the strangeness of what he had just seen made him slow down, then stop, and then turn around to look back at the car and its sole occupant.  The car itself was rather small, it looked ancient, and it was dirty, and it appeared to have once been the color blue.  It was a Ford Pinto, a type of car Hank used to see a lot when he was younger, but which had, over the years, become a rare sight.  It had an Alaska license plate.  A ragged bumper sticker read "Proud Member of the American Left-Footed Brakers Association".
     Hank thought again of the face of the man who was sitting in the driver's seat.  It occurred to him that he looked oddly familiar, that he had seen this man before.  And it bothered him that he wasn't sure if this man was alive or not.  Though Hank was, by nature, somewhat shy and unassertive, he nevertheless forced himself to walk back to the car to make sure the man was all right.
     "Sir?  Hello?  Sir?  Are you okay?" he said as he tapped on the window.  The old man's eyelids began to flutter and then open, and a loud snort came out of his mouth.  He then suddenly straightened up in his seat and turned toward Hank with an alarmed look on his face.
     "Whaddya want?" the man barked.   His eyes were wide open now, and he was obviously startled.
     "I was just...  I was wanting to know if...   if you were okay," stumbled Hank. The old man's wild hair and semi-crazed look on his face had thrown him off a bit.  "Could you roll down your window for a minute?"  The old man's eyes scanned Hank from head to toe as he reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a pack of Lucky Strikes.  He deftly pulled out a cigarette and lit it with a tiny, plastic Bic lighter, and after looking Hank over one more time, apparently judged that he didn't appear to be too much of a threat, and he went ahead and rolled the window down.
     "Listen.  I wasn't doin' nothin' wrong.  Why you hasslin' me?"
     "Oh, no...  I didn't say you were doing nothing wrong.  I was just checking to see if you were... uh... well... never mind."  Hank stepped back.  He wanted to be on his way, but there was something about the old man's face that kept him rooted where he stood.  "If you don't mind my asking... cause you look kind of familiar to me... what's your name?"
     The old man's face now looked somewhat peeved.  "Who the hell's askin'?" he shot back.
     Hank thought the question was fair, so he responded, "My name's Hank Wendt."  By instinct, he held out his hand when he said this.  The old man's expression went from peeved straight back to alarmed.  His mouth opened a bit, but the cigarette didn't fall out.  It was stuck somehow to his lower lip.  "Did you say Hank Wendt?"
    "Yeah, that's what I said."
     "Well, I'll be go to hell!  Hang on a minute," said the old man.  He appeared to be trying to open the driver's side door, even banging his shoulder against it, and he wasn't having much luck.  He then spouted off a couple of cuss words before looking back at Hank.  "Could ya open the door for me, son?"  Hank quickly pulled the door open, and the old man slowly got out and stood up, his joints and bones making more creaks, snaps, and pops than a bowl of Rice Krispies.  After coming to his full height, which was about a head shorter than Hank, he furrowed his hairy brow and said, "I'm sorry, but I'm goin' to have to take a leak.  Let me know if there's a car a comin', wouldja?"
     Before Hank could react, the old man was urinating in the gutter.  Feeling greatly uncomfortable, Hank nevertheless kept close watch on the street.  The steady, steamy stream coming out of the guy seemed endless, going on and on for over five minutes.  Finally it slowed to a trickle and then stopped, and the old man cut loose with a loud fart that seemed, to Hank, like a final punctuation mark coming at the end of a page-long run-on sentence.
     "Hooooweeee!  That's better!"  The old man zipped himself back up and turned to face Hank.  "Now I can talk!"  This time he had a broad smile on his face.  "You don't know how happy this makes me to see you, Hank!  I've been looking for you for a long time!"  He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out an antique-looking snub-nosed revolver, and he pointed it directly at Hank.  "Get in the car.  You're coming with me."
     Upon seeing the gun, Hank immediately put both hands in the air.  "What's going on?" he demanded.
     "You're being abducted!" the old man responded. "Now get in!"


(Next time:  Oh, Montana! continues as Hank discovers who abducted him, and why...)

Pick o' the Day: Grandpa's Top Ten Rules of Order

1.  If there is anyone else in the house, I mean anyone, who is capable of changing a grandbaby's diaper, then that person MUST be the one to change the diaper.  Grandpa will change the diaper if he is the ONLY one around who can do it.

2.  Grandpas need lots of kisses from grandbabies in order to survive.  If they don't get lots of them, they will wither away and die.

3.  Grandpas don't have to bathe on Saturday, nor brush their teeth, nor shave, nor change their underwear, nor wear a belt, nor anything else, unless they want to.

4.  It's best to stay out of Grandpa's business.  No one should try to tell him his business.  Only Grandpa know's what his business is. 

5.  Never tell Grandpa his shoes need polishing.  He doesn't care.

6.  Never tell Grandpa he's going to get a hot, grilled ham and cheese sandwich and then change your mind and fix him just a cold sandwich.  That's kind of cruel.

7.  Never fill up Grandpa's DVR storage space with boring women's movies from Lifetime Channel, major network primetime law or medical dramas, anything from TLC Channel, or the Food Channel unless you have received prior authorization.  Pretty much anything from the History Channel is OK.

8.  You must do your best not to criticize Grandpa's driving.  He has been driving since before you were born.  He know's what he is doing.  There is a method to his madness.

9.  Don't get mad at Grandpa if he is reluctant to try something new.  He knows what he likes, and he has everything he needs.  He prefers things to be predictable.

10.  Don't let Nana be away from Grandpa too long.  He may pretend he likes some alone time, but he can't be happy unless she is near him.



     

Pick o' the Day: Oh, Montana! (Chapter 1 - Hank Wakes Up)

(And so begins Oh, Montana!, the second part

of the epic tale that began with The Grackle Catcher)

     Hank Wendt had found out the hard way that a serious head injury can lead a person to discover just how thin the veil actually is that separates this world from the next.  Sometimes he was aware that he was lying on a bed in what seemed to be a hospital ward, and this made sense to him (since he understood that he had been injured somehow), except that he could swear that Evangeline, his long-lost childhood love, whom he hadn't seen for years and years, was sitting there beside him, dabbing his forehead with a cool washcloth, or holding his hand, or kissing him on the cheek.  So that part was probably a dream.  But then he would find himself floating in air, surrounded by whispering shadows, and in the distance he would behold a brilliant and blindingly bright light that seemed, somehow, to beckon to him, and he wanted to go to it, but something was holding him back.  And when he would turn to look at what it was that held him, he would again see Evangeline's tearfully beautiful face smiling at him, and he would hear her gentle voice saying, "Come back to me, Hank" and "I love you, Hank" and "I need you, Hank."  And so he decided to stay.
     Eventually he found himself spending more and more time in this world and less and less in the other until one morning he opened his eyes and he knew that he was back for good.  He found he was indeed a patient in a hospital ward and that he had suffered a serious blow to his head that very nearly cost him his life.  And it really was Evangeline who had been taking care of him through it all.  Sure, the doctors and nurses had (probably) done everything they could for him, but he knew in his heart that it was she who had brought him back, who had insisted he come back, and who had made him truly want to come back.  As he gazed around his bed, he noticed, to his delight, a red, heart-shaped helium balloon tied near his feet that had the words "Get Well Soon" printed on it.  On the small nightstand near his head, there was a miniature teddy bear holding a sign that said, "I love you BEARY much!"  Hank thought that was both touching and funny at the same time.  There were fresh-cut flowers in a vase and a 3x5 portrait of Evangeline (in a frame hand-decorated with what seemed like hundreds of tiny red hearts) that he could admire when she wasn't there in person.  And if it wasn't for the fact that strange people kept dying all around him, he could have sworn that he had woken up in heaven.
     A nurse who brought him his lunch told him he was in the Blessing Street Shelter for the Chronically Hopeless, and she seemed a bit surprised that he was recovering, since most of their patients were so bad off that there wasn't much they could do for them except keep them as comfortable as possible until they finally kicked the bucket.  And that happened quite a bit there in the crowded, ten-bed ward where Hank had found himself.  Despite that depressing fact, he counted himself lucky that he had been brought to this fine facility, and he figured it was nothing short of a miracle that it was the place where Evangeline happened to work.  She usually didn't come in until the night shift started, but lately, according to the nurse, she had been coming in a lot earlier to spend extra time with him.  The nurse also said that Evangeline told them that she and Hank were old friends from way back.  Hank smiled when he heard this, but he kept it to himself that he and Evangeline had, in fact, been married, thinking that perhaps it was not something the nurses needed to know.  The smell of the food then hit his nostrils, and he realized that he felt like he was starving, so he eagerly ate the fabulous meal that was set before him (which included some sort of real meat with gravy, green beans, and a roll with butter, topped off with a small cup of lime Jello with a bonus dollop of whipped cream... Wow!).  Then, feeling much better, he lay back on his bed to wait for Evangeline to come.
     He hadn't realized he had dozed off until he felt a gentle touch on his forearm, and he woke with a slight start.  "Hello, Hank!" said Evangeline.  "How are you?  They tell me you woke up today, and you even ate your lunch!"  She was standing at his side, her face as devastatingly beautiful as it ever was, and Hank felt like he was going to melt if he kept looking at her.  So he looked away for a moment, cleared his throat, and then he turned back and said, "Evangeline!  I did wake up today!  And I think I'm going to be okay."
     "That's wonderful, Hank!"  Her face was beaming with happiness.  "I brought you a present.  It's something I baked just for you!"  She carefully placed a colorfully (and perfectly) wrapped box into his hands.  Hank unwrapped the gift (making sure to save the bow, since that way it could be used again someday) and discovered a neat and fragrant stack of nut-filled brownies.  Try as he might, he couldn't recall ever having received such a wonderful gift before.  "Go ahead and have one," said Evangeline.  "You need to start gaining some weight back."
     When she said that, it occurred to Hank that he didn't know how long he had been in that semi-conscious state, and when he asked her if she knew, she told him that it had been for almost two weeks.  "What happened to me?" he asked her.  She told him what she knew, that he had been found lying injured on the ground behind a B-U-T-T-S  grocery store.  The EMTs had told her that they thought he was a homeless guy who was probably scrounging for food or something, but she said she didn't believe that.  "But what were you doing back there, Hank?" she asked.  "I... I don't know," replied Hank.  "I can't remember."
     "Do you remember your address, Hank?  Or a phone number?  I'm sure your family is worried sick about you, and we need to let them know you're okay."   He thought about it for a moment, but the only thing that came to him just then was a headache.  "Owww.  No... I don't remember much of anything right now.  But I remember you.... us... in seventh grade.  Evangeline, I've missed you so much.  And I never got to tell you goodbye..."  She gently shushed him and put a cool washcloth on his forehead.  "I've missed you, too.  And I'm not going anywhere.  You better close your eyes and rest now."  Hank did as he was told, and he was soon snoring away.  Evangeline then spent the next hour caressing his cheek with the back of her hand, stopping now and then to dab her eyes with a tissue.
     After a few more days of steady progress, he was informed one morning by the nurses that he was well enough to be discharged.  They knew he was experiencing some profound memory loss and that he couldn't remember if he had a home to go to, but his hospital bed was needed for those who were worse off than him, and Hank couldn't argue with that line of reasoning.  They brought him his clothes and kindly helped him pack his things in a paper sack.  One nurse was even nice enough to tie his helium balloon to his wrist so that it wouldn't get blown away by the icy wind outside.  He asked them if he could wait long enough for Evangeline to come so that he could thank her and tell her goodbye, and they said he could sit in the waiting room if he wanted to.  When Evangeline arrived that evening about 8:00, she found Hank sitting in a chair by the front door, and she saw his face light up when he saw her.  "What's going on, Hank?" she asked.  "What are you doing out of bed?"  When she found out they wanted to send him away without knowing if he had somewhere to go, and that he had been sitting in the waiting room for hours and hours, the smile on her face disappeared, and it was replaced with a look that was sort of scary.  She started towards the nursing station, but after a few steps she stopped.  She turned to look at Hank.  He could see that her face was red, and she was biting her lower lip.  She then walked over to him, held out her hand, and said, "Hank, will you come stay with me at my house?  I have plenty of room, and you'll be safe and warm until we find your family."
     Hank was astounded by her wonderfully generous offer, and he could think of no where else he would rather go.  But he said, "Evangeline, you've done too much for me already.  You don't have to do this.  I was only waiting here to thank you."
     "You are coming with me, Hank.  Let's go."  She picked up his paper bag and took his hand and together they walked out into the cold night air.  She led him to her little car and helped him get buckled into the passenger seat.  As she walked to the driver's side, she glanced around the parking lot and noticed someone sitting alone in the dark interior of an ancient and beat-up-looking Ford Pinto with Alaska license plates that was parked nearby, and the person appeared to be watching them.  She could barely make out a faint orange glow as it appeared, then disappeared, followed by a stream of cigarette smoke wafting out of a window that was opened just a crack.  Evangeline shuddered, turned back to her own car, got in, and drove away.  After several attempts to start up, the Pinto finally roared to life and began a slow and smoky rumble down the road behind them.
  
(Next time:  Oh, Montana! continues as Hank begins his rehabilitation under the loving care of Evangeline, but their happiness is short-lived when a certain shady character comes back into Hank's life...)
       

Pick o' the Day: Alert! I Just Woke Up in an Alternate Universe!

      Okay.  I'm trying to stay calm here.  I have forced myself to stop pacing around the living room like a lunatic, and I have decided to sit at the computer and write it all down.  I'm trying to make sense of what happened, and all the usual explanations just don't work.  And now I'm forced to consider the last-resort, oh-my-goodness- gracious (no!) www.coasttocoastam.com theory because it's the only one that's making sense to me!  But because of this, many people are going to think I'm crazy, or, at the very least, delusional!  Or just plain (unsalted) NUTS!  I don't care!  I have just experienced a Glitch in the Matrix, a Wrinkle in Time, a Peek Behind the Curtain, or a full-fledged jump to an Alternate Universe!  Whatever you prefer.  But the world is different this morning from what it was when I went to bed last night!
      I'll admit it's not a really big change.  In fact, some might say it's no big deal at all.  I agree it's subtle, so subtle that I almost missed it.  And that's just the point.  These glitches, these wrinkles, these jumps are probably happening to all of us many times during our lives, and we are so oblivious to what is really going on around us that we just don't notice when it happens.  But once in a while, we do notice.  And it is extremely spooky when you realize it just happened to you.  I can only recall two other times in my life when I can say for sure this has happened to me.  The first was in 7th Grade science class when Mr. Newman, the teacher, snickered at me and announced to the class that, contrary to what I may have heard, excessive candy-eating does not cause pimple outbreaks!  This was after I had just relayed to the class what my mother had told me the day before.  So one day candy causes pimples.  The next day it doesn't.  Hello Glitch Number One!
     Glitch Number Two happened about five years ago.  I was listening to a Coast to Coast program about this kind of experience in relation to the topic of the Thunderbird (the big, scary bird, not the car), and an example was given in which many people swear they have seen a photograph of 1880's-type miner dudes in Arizona standing over the carcass of a full-grown Pterodactyl with a wingspan of about thirty feet after shooting it out of the sky over Tombstone.  I realized I was one of the people who had seen this photograph.  The only thing is, no one can find this photograph now.  No one can confirm that it actually existed.  It's like it never really happened.  But I know I saw the picture.  Many people did!  I have spent hours online trying to track it down.  It's gone!  One day it exists.  The next day it doesn't.  Hello Glitch Number Two!
     And now we come to Glitch Number Three.  The one I discovered this morning as I was innocently reading my Sunday newspaper and sipping my H.E.B. brand Breakfast Blend coffee.  I had finished the major sections of the paper and had just completed my search for Parade Magazine, you know, the one they hide amid all the advertisements just to make you mad, and I started to thumb through it.  I don't usually read the cover story because it's usually about some celebrity I don't care about.  Today's is no exception - a huge article about George Clooney.  I have very little interest in him, and there was no way I was going to invest any time reading this story.  But as I was flipping through it, I noticed a picture of George standing with his parents Nick and Nina.  And I froze mid-flip!  What?  The overlong hairs on the back of my neck (I'm in serious need of a haircut, Natalie!) stood up and started doing cartwheels!  Now, I know what you are going to say!  This is no big deal!  But it is a big deal!  It is totally different from what I have known for a very long time!  And it must mean I have (accidently) jumped to an alternate universe!  George Clooney is NOT the son of "Nick and Nina"!  He is the son of the famous singer Rosemary Clooney!  I know he is.  I know I have read this many times before!  Everybody knows this.  Right?
     This creeped me out so badly that I jumped over to the computer and started googling.  Like a bad nightmare, everything I could find claimed that George is the NEPHEW of Rosemary, not the son!  What?  How can this be?  Yesterday he was Rosemary's son.  Today he is Rosemary's nephew.  No big deal?  THIS IS A VERY BIG DEAL!  Subtle, yet mind-blowing!  This is a Glitch!  This is an ALTERNATE UNIVERSE!  I don't care a whit about George or his relationship to Rosemary.  I do care that the universe I lived in yesterday is not the same one I am in today!
     My wife could see that I was upset, and she asked me what was going on.  Instead of telling her, I asked if she knew how George was related to Rosemary.  She laughed and said that "everybody knows he's her nephew!"  Oh, no!  I stared at her for a long time.  Is she the same person who was my wife yesterday?  Or is she the wife I have in an alternate universe?  Which is not actually an alternate universe now because I am currently experiencing it at this moment!  My mind is reeling!  Now I'm wondering what else is different!  After a quick check of both the mirror and my bank balance, I have discovered that this is not the alternate universe where I am a good-looking multi-millionaire (dang it!).  But, man!  This is eerie!  I'm almost afraid to check my coffee can.  I might find that it is now Maxwell House or something!
     Now, I know that this sounds kooky.  I find it hard to believe myself!  But if you agree with me, then it probably means that you made the jump during the night right along with me.  And if you are one of the people who "always knew" that George is the nephew of Rosemary, then that means you are a citizen of the alternate universe to which the rest of us have just jumped.  If so, I want you to know that we come in peace.
     One last thought before I release this news to the world via Facebook.  What might have cause this event to happen?  Perhaps it was the re-entry of the weather satellite that supposedly crashed into the Northern Pacific Ocean yesterday.  Or Rick Perry being trounced by Herman Cain in the Florida Straw Poll.  Or the Bastrop fire.  Or the endless heat.  Or the drought.  Or... a million other things.  I don't know.  I feel confused.  I've been working awfully hard lately.  I think I need an Ibuprofen and to lie down for awhile.  
             

Pick o' the Day: Living on Love

A long time ago

When I first fell in love with you,

I knew right away

You were the one I wanted to marry.

And I knew it could not happen

Soon enough.

I knew that every second we spent apart

Was a precious second we could never get back.

Yet some people told me to wait

And not be in a hurry.

Put marriage off until you finish your education

And have a career.

After all, you cannot live on love, you know.

But I didn’t listen to them.

Something inside of me told me not to wait.

No matter what they said.

And so we married

To never again be apart.

And we were poor, and we struggled,

And we sacrificed, and we worked.

And we prayed.

And we brought two children into this world.

And with them came even more responsibility.

But we adapted, became creative,

Kept our optimism as best we could,

And never gave up.

And life eventually became easier to deal with.

But just when I thought I had everything figured out,

New storm clouds appeared on the horizon

Bringing monsoons of heartache and pain.

And the threats to our sacred marriage were great.

But through it all

Something held our family together

And would not let us break apart.

And that something is love.

And to those who say you cannot live on love,

I say to them they are telling a lie,

For indeed it has been love

That has kept us living

And together all these years.

And it is love

That will keep us as one until the end of our days.

Pick o' the Day: The Joke from Another World

            A couple of nights ago, a joke came to me in a dream.  I am not making this up.  I was either told this joke by a spirit entity, or my brain created it all on its own without my conscious help.  I had not been thinking about French food prior to this, and I have certainly not thought of Pâté de Foie Gras in years (nor have I ever tasted it).  It repeated so many times in my head during the dream that I was able to remember it when I woke up, and I quickly wrote it down.  Here it is: 

So I bought a French cookbook the other day, and I made my first gourmet delicacy.

Yeah?  What was it?

I made some Ptuey de Foie Gras.

Don’t you mean Pâté?

Well, I thought so, until I tasted it.

Pick o' the Day: The Case of the Inks Lake Monster

 Another Reluctant English Major Adventure!

           In the midst of the magnificent Texas Hill Country lies a body of water called Inks Lake, one link in the Highland Lakes chain created long ago by the damming of the historically flood-prone Colorado River (no, not that Colorado River – but another one).  It is a popular site for recreational boaters and fishermen, and many camping spaces are available for public use in the adjacent Inks Lake State Park.  In addition to these camping spaces, the park boasts a lakeside store where one can purchase snacks, ice, and bait.  There is also a well-maintained swimming beach and a playground for the little ones to enjoy.  And about three years ago, there was one more thing the park offered - something that was not mentioned by signage nor brochure.  It was… a monster.  And this is the story of how my humble family and I encountered the beast and lived to tell the tale.

 

            It is my family’s long-standing ritual during the month of July to seek relief from the intolerable heat and humidity of the Central Texas midsummer doldrums by attaching our pop-up tent trailer to our motorcar and joining the waves of sweaty and bedraggled heat-refugees streaming out of the city in search of leafy and shaded campgrounds that offer access to large bodies of cool water (along with clean restrooms and electrical hook-ups).  And that particular summer would be no exception.  There were five of us who were able to make the trip that time: in addition to myself, of course, were my wife, my son and his wife (my granddaughter “Baby” had not yet been born), and my daughter’s dog, a pretty little brown-haired dachshund.  No one could remember why “Mia” was even on this camping trip, since my daughter was unable to join us, but nevertheless, she had tagged along, too.

            Our drive through the Hill Country was rather uneventful, and soon we found ourselves pulling into the entrance to the state park.  In no time at all we had secured for ourselves a quiet and secluded campsite for our pop-up tent next to a reedy fen alongside the lake, which provided us quick and convenient access to the water for our canoe.  We felt lucky to be far from the normal hustle and bustle of the popular camping ground.  Our closest neighbors were a young couple with a large, free-roaming black dog who were tenting in a rocky outcrop about sixty feet away, and one enormous Boy Scout troop comprised of approximately 17 overweight adult men in silly uniforms and eighty-three excited teen-age boys who were apparently enjoying, to the dismay of their stunned on-lookers, their National Jamboree (and who were encamped just across the road).  But despite all the noise, our little family decided we were going to have fun anyway.  And fun we had, that is, until the sun went down the following evening, when the Inks Lake Monster paid us a courtesy call.

            But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.  It was Friday night, and there was plenty of work to do getting camp set up.  We men set about the task of unfolding and cranking-up the tent trailer, while the women started a fire and began cooking the traditional first-night meal of roasted-weenies-on-a-stick and potato chips (nobody likes working hard on a meal on the first night).  After enjoying this easy yet satisfying meal, we all sat around the fire telling jokes and stories and admiring the stars while my son casually strummed on his guitar the haunting notes of Stairway to Heaven.  It was a beautiful first evening at the lake, but we were all weary from the day’s strenuous activities, so we decided to retire to the trailer early and get a good night’s rest.         

            At exactly 6:00 the next morning, I was gently awakened by the soothing sounds of Reveille, as generated by the Boy Scout troop’s overly-enthusiastic twelve-year-old bugler, who sounded as if he were standing no more that ten feet from my head.  When he mercifully finished, I found myself unable get back to sleep because I am of the age when my bladder and bowels conspire together to make the most important decisions of the morning.  They had decided it was time for me to get up, and I had no choice but to obey.  And so I was compelled to climb over my sleeping wife, hastily pull on a t-shirt and a pair of cargo shorts, and then try to find my flip-flops in the dim light before making my way out of the trailer as quietly as possible, all the while struggling to prevent, for the sake of my family, a premature and catastrophic release of malodorous flatulence, generated by the six bun-sized kraut dogs I had eaten the previous evening, and that had built up within my intestines during the course of the night.  It was approximately 100 yards from the door of my trailer to the nearest outhouse, and it is rather amazing how far that actually seems when one is already way past the crisis point, if you know what I mean.  My desperation during the last 50 yards was such that I do not even remember that particular leg of the journey.  I must have been a comical sight to the Boy Scouts who lined the path… a grossly disheveled figure with a horrified expression on his face, hastening along in a strangely contorted gait with glazed eyes fixed on the distant latrine.  Woe to any unlucky soul who would be blocking my way once I got there!  Luckily for all, the restroom was unoccupied.

            My leisurely stroll back to camp in the morning sunshine was much more pleasant, but upon my return I noticed something odd.  Our usually neat and orderly site was in an unusual state of chaotic disarray!  It appeared that, as we were soundly sleeping during the night, someone (or something) had riffled through our food box, scattering snack wrappers and sunflower seeds all around, and our carefully whittled collection of weenie sticks had been licked clean!  My initial reaction of bewildered indignation quickly metamorphosed into a sea-surge of excitement!  Could we have a mystery on our hands?  As the readers of this series know, I fancy myself a bit of a sleuth, and I am able to employ my vast store of trivial knowledge (built up by years and years of reading newspapers and solving crossword puzzles), used in concert with my talent of discerning small details that usually go unnoticed by the common man, in order to solve the many that come my way.  I quickly ran to fetch my trusty magnifying glass from the glove compartment of my motorcar, and I returned to the scene of the crime ready to give it a good going-over.

            In a matter of minutes, I discovered my first tantalizing clue, though its eerie nature caused my gun-metal-gray ear hairs to stand on end.  It was a footprint!  Or should I say “paw print”, for it was definitely not human.  In fact, it was the print of some sort of clawed beast!  And what was worse, a closer examination revealed it to be webbed!  I then noticed more tracks of a similar nature, and they seemed to have come from, and to have returned to, the reedy fen where we had parked our canoe.  It was as if some foul, slimy beast from the murky depths had crawled onto the shore and made its malevolent way to our camp during the dark of night.  I found myself thanking my Creator that we had been protected behind the sturdy aluminum and canvas walls of the pop-up tent as we slept, or else we might all have suffered a violent attack!

            Just then, I heard the faint stirrings of the others in my camping party, signaling their imminent awakening, and I made the decision that I would not ruin their weekend by sharing the news and thereby possibly causing a panic.  I decided to keep this information to myself for now until I could formulate a plan to fight this monster, so I hurriedly put the camp back in order and swept away all traces of the beastly claw prints.  I then restarted the fire and put a pot of coffee on to boil.  Sure enough, the others emerged from the tent trailer in various states of morning fog, and I employed my acting skills to their maximum by putting on a happy face and feigning a cheery attitude, all the while wondering if this was the last day on Earth for one or all of us.

            Our day progressed as planned, and we enjoyed many sunlit hours of fishing off the canoe, hiking nearby trails, and swimming at the beach.  I did not fear a daylight attack by the beast because he had revealed himself to be a nocturnal creature, and so I had a sufficient amount of time to plot a plan of action in the event he paid us another visit that evening.  In fact, I became determined to actually encourage a visit, since I had never actually seen a monster from the deep before, and though the very thought of it chilled me to the bone, I had the comfort of knowing that I was not unarmed, for I had my trusty Cutco knife sheathed and strapped to my side.  Any beast who dared to threaten my well-being, or that of any member of my family, would soon regret it, for he would surely be given a sharp poke he would not soon forget!

            And so I began laying a trap to draw the filthy beast back into our camp.  I instructed the one who was to be our dinner cook that evening, in this case my son, that we would be enjoying fried polska kielbasa as our main course (for the evidence from our weenie sticks told me that the foul fiend from the murky depths had a taste for greasy sausage).  I was sure that when the enticing scent of our pan-fried dinner reached his hideous nostrils, he would be irresistibly drawn straight into my trap.  I would be waiting for him, with knife in hand, and no matter what might happen after that, my family would, at the very least, have a jolly good yarn to tell around our campfires for years to come.

            Knowing the monster was nocturnal, I endeavored to delay, as best I could, the start of the preparation of our evening repast until the sun went down.  I did this by providing entertainment to the other members of my family in the form of playing all of the principal roles in an impromptu performance of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in a semi-successful attempt to keep their minds off their famished stomachs.  Alas, I could hold their attention but for a little while (just until Act IV, scene ii, where the craftsmen are sitting around worrying about Bottom, who hasn’t been seen since the appearance of the ass-headed monster in the forest), but it was enough, for the sun had finally set, and twilight had descended upon us.  I called for the fire to be lit, and soon the sweet, smoky scent of the tender kielbasa filets began to waft out over the lake.  A growing uneasiness came over me, making me think we should not be waiting long for our uninvited guest to arrive.

            In an attempt to calm my nerves, I sat down in my folding chair, picked-up the guitar, and began gently serenading my wife with a tender version of South of the Border, while my son, as he was furiously frying-up the kielbasa, provided back-up harmony on the chorus.  My daughter-in-law was quietly writing in her journal by the light of the campfire.  Mia was leashed to the picnic table, and she seemed to be enjoying the music as she, too, patiently awaited her evening meal.  And it was at this particular idyllic moment – sitting next to a crackling fire, smelling supper frying in the pan, serenading the love of my life – that the black-hearted beast decided to make his move and, unbeknownst to me (as my mind was focused on remembering the seventeenth verse of the song), slowly came creeping up out of the water and began silently slithering on his belly up to the left side of my chair.

            Now I believe we should pause the story for a moment to provide a bit of background information that will help explain what happened next.  Due to a childhood accident, I do not possess the ability to hear out of my right ear, but I am eternally grateful to my Creator that He saw fit to endow me with a spare one on the other side of my head.  And I have been able to function somewhat satisfactorily since then with one exception – I am not able to hear in stereo.  As a result, it is extremely difficult for me to distinguish from which direction a sound is coming.  I tell you this because Mia was the first to detect the presence of the monster, and she proceeded to provide us a helpful warning by emitting the loudest and most blood-curdling growl ever to come out of the mouth of a miniature canine!  At the very same moment, the peripheral vision in my left eye detected a slight movement on the ground in the darkness on my left side, and my audio impairment made it seem that the hideous and alarming growl was coming from that very spot!

            In an instant, my adrenal glands went into overdrive and squirted an unexpectedly large and wholly inordinate amount of adrenaline into my lower backside, with the result being that I basically launched from my chair like a 4^th of July rocket while letting out an uncontrolled American Indian war whoop, and I landed on my feet directly in front of the menacing water-beast!  The last thing I remember before passing out was seeing a huge and horrifying, jet-black, panther-like creature in a predatory crouch (the kind of crouch it would be in just before it springs and rips apart its prey!)  And then, as they say, the lights went out.

            Moments later, I came to as my face was being licked clean by the tongues of not one, but two overly-affectionate dogs.  Sitting up, I discovered that one of them, of course, was Mia.  And the other was, much to my surprise, a large, slobbery black Labrador named Bart, the one that belonged to our neighbors in the adjoining campsite!  He was the beast!  I was stunned by the revelation!  It took a couple of minutes for the cobwebs to clear from my head, and after I was helped back to my folding chair, the other members of my family filled me in on what had actually happened.  It seems that my plan to entice the monster with the scent of fried polska kielbasa was fabulously successful, and it had the effect of drawing our canine friend from his evening swim straight into our camp.  Being the friendly and unassuming chap that he was, Bart was in his “groveling” position that he found useful whenever he begged for a meal.  And I found out it was Mia who had let out the shocking growl that had startled me so.

            With that, the case of the Inks Lake Monster was solved!  I was obviously profoundly relieved that everything had turned out satisfactorily, and everyone was safe.  But even though Black Bart wasn’t actually a real monster, in the normal sense of the word, the effect he had on me was the same.  And that might have had something to do with our decision to vacation in the mountains of Colorado the following year.       

Pick o' the Day: The Case of the Missing Chocolate Nutty

 A Reluctant English Major Adventure!

           I was standing in my den puffing on my pipe while perusing my collection of maps of China with the intent of formulating a plan for my next big-game hunt, and I had begun by circling areas that I thought would most likely be overpopulated by those pesky and ferocious Panda Bears, when I was startled by an intense and incessant buzzing in my left side front pants pocket.  There was no need for my eyes to leave their fervent study of the map, for my left hand instinctively reached into the pocket, reemerged clasping my state-of-the-art Verizon LG flip-phone (with both an attractive metallic-silver finish and camera/ texting capabilities), dexterously opened it, and held it up against my ear.  I then proceeded to speak.  “This is Blaine.  How can I be of service to you?” This, of course, is my standard telephone greeting when I am in the dark about who may be calling me.

            “Yellow!”  The voice on the other end of the wireless line sounded vaguely familiar, but I could not immediately place it.  It was coming from a lower range, somewhere between bass and baritone, with a timbre that sounded as if the vocal chords, whose mildly violent vibrations had generated the sound, had been marinated for decades in rich, black, Columbian coffee.  I thought it a bit curious that the male speaker who had responded to my greeting had chosen to do so by boldly stating the name of a primary color normally used for the subtractive combining of colors, as in mixing or dyes.  What in the world could he possibly mean by uttering such a word?  My mind raced through all of its possible denotations and connotations, and most of them, unfortunately, were of a derogatory nature.  Yet I resisted the impulse to respond in like manner to the initial rudeness of the up-to-this-point-unknown caller.

            “I beg your pardon?” I rejoined, my above-normal sense of curiosity having been piqued.

            “Uh, I said… yellow?  I was wondering if I could speak with my son.”

            Aha!  And so the mysterious caller had unknowingly revealed himself at last!  It was my father!  My powers of deduction were as sharp as ever, enabling me to identify the man behind the voice in little more than a few short seconds!  I was not unfamiliar with this character, for I had known him, and have had dealings with him, for more than a half century.  He was a genial sort of chap, though a bit rugged and rough around the edges, who had, over the years, apparently developed some sort of interest in the events that were happening in my life, and who would, on occasion, ring me up on my telephone to find out such information.  I generally found him to be harmless enough, and so I usually did not begrudge him his requests.  He was also one of the most faithful readers of my blog, and who was very often kind enough to post a humorous comment or a valid question, thereby letting me know that what I had written had provoked thought in at least one other human being on the planet!

            I also remembered that my father did not like for me to engage in verbal discourse with him in the register in which I had become accustomed ever since I had graduated from the elite and prestigious University of Arizona with a major in English, where I had been forcibly exposed, often against my will, to the writings of Shakespeare and others of his ilk, and which had the unanticipated effect of elevating my speech from that of your average, Midwestern, small-town boy into that of a somewhat precocious American lad who had been awarded a degree for becoming semi-familiar with a few works of British literature and who had begun speaking thereafter in what, by all accounts, was a bad, and obviously fake, English accent.  And yet, try as I might, I found it extremely difficult, if not semi-impossible, to modify my speech in a manner that he would find less irksome.

            “It is I, your son!  To what do I owe the pleasure of receiving this telephone call?”

            “What?  Okay, whatever,” he said, with a slight tinge of aggravation.  “Listen, We’ve’ve got a problem.  In fact, it’s more than a problem.  It’s a mystery!”

            At the sound of the “M” word, the one that preceded the invisible exclamation point that marked the end of his utterance, my ears pricked up in the manner of a cat that had just detected the ever-so-faint tip-tip-tippy-toeing of a mouse stealthily seeking the sumptuous sustenance provided by cookie crumbs and snack wrappers that tend to collect beneath my living room sofa.  As everyone knows, I love a good mystery, as I fancy myself a bit of an amateur sleuth, and I will jump at the chance to employ my vast store of trivial knowledge, used in concert with my talent of discerning small details that usually go unnoticed by the common man, for the purpose of solving a good one.

            “A mystery, you say.  Pray continue, my good man.”

            “Yeah, it’s a mystery all right.  But I think it’s a bit stupid to talk about it over the phone.  Just come on up to the kitchen!”  He then hung up.

            The prospect of having a good mystery to solve made the interruption of my work in the den a small matter indeed, so I put away my maps and made my way up the basement steps to the kitchen.  There stood my father, in close proximity to the counter area next to the kitchen sink, and he appeared to be looking down at an open box of donuts.  Beside him, standing on a chair, was my two-year-old granddaughter, known to one and all as “Baby”, and when she saw me she yelled out, “Hi, Gan-pah!  Don-duts!  Wansome?”

            “I most assuredly do!” I exclaimed as I expeditiously walked over to make my selection.

            “Not so fast,” cautioned my father.  “I want you to look at something first.”

            Together the three of us looked at the open box that sat upon the countertop.  I noticed the word “Super” was imprinted on the side of it, leading me to suspect that these tasty treats had been manufactured at the neighborhood Super Donut Shop.  Continuing my inspection, I observed that there was a variety of luscious cake donuts that filled the box in a most delicious and tantalizing way.  There was a glazed, a chocolate iced, a strawberry with sprinkles, a coconut, a glazed cruller, a chocolate cruller, a maple, a sugar, a cinnamon, a powdered, and even a plain.  Altogether, it was a veritable cornucopia of delectable delights that simply oozed with an aura of nothing less than pure happiness!  I saw no mystery there!

            “Mmmmm.  Nummyliscious!” exclaimed Baby.  Ungrammatical as her comment was, it was, nonetheless, exactly correct.

            “If I am not mistaken, I was under the impression that there was some sort of problem,” I remarked.  “I have never before considered the consumption of an aromatic assortment of angelic pastries a cause of any great concern.”

            “Perhaps you might try counting them,” suggested my father.  I found his suggestion to be interesting enough to warrant the expenditure of the necessary mental energy to follow through with the mathematical calculations required to ensure an accurate count of the delightful delicacies that lay before me. 

            “Hmmm,” I hummed as I finished my count.  “There seems to be only eleven donuts here, although based on the expectations of most donut-shop patrons, as well as the number that comes to my mind through my own experience of purchasing such ambrosial and appetizing pleasures, one would reasonably expect there to be a full dozen.”

            “Exactly!” responded my father.

            “Zakly!” echoed my granddaughter, nodding her head in agreement.

            “Ahhh!  A mystery, indeed!” I stated.  I sensed the wheels and gears within my mind begin turning at a prodigious rate as they processed the information, and within a matter of a few seconds, they produced a set of assumptions which I could therefore relate to my expectant family members.  “I do not see it as necessary for you to relate to me the events that have led up to the discovery of the incomplete assortment we see before us, for I will do that for you, if I may be so bold.”

            “Go ahead,” murmured my father.

            “Well then, it goes like this.  Earlier this very morning you awoke with a strong desire for something sweet to go with your usual ten cups of coffee, and, after being unable to find an adequate and satisfactory candidate within the kitchen cupboards that would fit the bill, you decided to make a short trip by motorcar to the nearest Super Donut Shop for the express purpose of purchasing a dozen mixed-variety donuts to bring back home for the enjoyment of us all.  On your way out, you were met by my granddaughter, your great-granddaughter, who expressed the desire to go with you.  We all know that Baby does not accept the word ‘NO’ as a viable option, thus making it necessary that both of you conduct a frustrating search of the entire house in order to find a matched pair of shoes for her, after which you then commenced your journey together to the donut shop.”

            “Go on,” nodded my father.

            “When the two of you arrived at the Super Donut Shop, you would have entered the store hand-in-hand, and you would have been immediately greeted by a rather over-friendly, middle-aged, female Asian-immigrant clerk, a certain Ms. Lin, if I remember correctly from her name tag, who has apparently received much more training in the art of up-selling than she has in the learning of the English language.  As a result, you would have found yourself to be pressured into making your selections in a rapid, rather than leisurely, manner while constantly being bombarded with questions such as: ‘Would you like to try one of our Kolaches?’ and ‘Do you know that a full dozen is a much better deal?’ and ‘Would you like some coffee?’ and ‘Would you like it to be heated-up?’ and what seemed like hundreds of other questions.  But if you asked her a question in an attempt to clarify an offer, or to ask her how her day has been, or if you attempted to say anything but ‘Yes’ or ‘No’, she would have looked at you for a brief second with a puzzled expression before continuing with the up-sell, which would continue even after you had handed-over your debit card and were awaiting the bank’s approval.  As a result, you would be thinking to yourself, ‘Please just give me my donuts!’ and ‘I just want to get out of here!’ and ‘Arrrrrrrrrrrgh!’, which is the reason why I am very glad that it is you who went there this morning rather than I.”

            “That is correct,” agreed my father.

            “Nevertheless, when you had finally obtained your purchase, you were satisfied that you had received everything you had asked for because you had witnessed her putting each and every donut you had pointed-out into the box.  And when you left the store, and after you had buckled Baby into her car seat in the back, your great granddaughter would have insisted on holding the box of donuts on her lap.  You would then have driven home, happy in the knowledge that you would soon be dunking a delectable donut into your first cup of morning joe.  But when you arrived here, you were dismayed to discover that one was missing.  Not only that, but the missing donut was the one which many of us would deem as the very best donut in the box – the exceedingly rare and hard-to-find ring-shaped cake of sweetened dough called the ‘Chocolate Nutty’.”

            “Yes, but how did you…?” my father began to ask.

            “Know that it is the Chocolate Nutty that is missing?” I rather rudely interrupted.  “Ha!  That is the very first donut we all look for when the box is opened, no?  Who can possibly resist a cake donut topped with delicious chocolate frosting and sprinkled with chopped nuts?  Who would have the will power to pass over such a tantalizing tidbit and select a lesser form of spherical goodness that was deep-fried in hot fat?  And behold!  There is no Chocolate Nutty in the box!”

            The three of us peered into the cardboard container together.  There was an empty space in the lower, right-hand corner that should have held the missing donut.  Instead, there were only two tiny and lonely-looking bits of nut laying on the bottom.  Baby quickly reached her tiny hand into the space and grabbed one of the minute pieces.  She then offered it to me. 

            “Here, Gan-pah!”  I declined her offer and told her she could have it.  She smiled.

            I then continued, “And so we have quite the conundrum!  A Chocolate Nutty donut cannot simply vanish into thin air as one drives home from a Super Donut Shop!”

            “Which is why I told you we have a mystery on our hands,” said my father, with a wink and a nod.

            I was genuinely perplexed.  “I am going to need to check the motorcar for clues,” I announced.  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”  After securing my magnifying glass and a flashlight from the den, I made my way out to the driveway and began a thorough forensic search of the vehicle, a la “CSI”.  Among the myriad curious and strange items I discovered on the carpet, under the seats, and in various dusty nooks and crannies were a quarter, my long-lost swimming earplug, my latest Susan Boyle CD, some mummified Cheeto bits, a ‘sippy’ cup with curdled milk in it, a McDonald’s bag full of crinkled-up McDouble wrappers, one water shoe, and no less than two copies of Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are”.  But most interestingly of all, I detected seven tiny pieces of nut on Baby’s car seat, as well as a smear of chocolate frosting on her right-hand side arm-rest.  I was stunned by the implications!  Could our Baby be somehow involved in the mysterious disappearance of the donut?  Did she know something that she has not yet revealed to us during the course of the investigation?  What could this mean?

            I quickly returned to the kitchen and found my father and his great granddaughter sitting at the table, apparently waiting for me to join them in the partaking of the fabulous feast of coffee, orange juice, and donuts which lay before them.  I walked over to Baby and examined her face through the magnifying glass.  Besides two humongous, bright blue, and blinking eyes, I saw the tell-tale marks of chocolate icing smudged around her smiling lips.

            “Baby, do you know who ate the Chocolate Nutty donut?” I asked.

            “I did it!” she exclaimed as she stood up on the chair and reached both arms up and out in a victorious ‘V’ sign!  Then, putting her left arm down, she yelled out, “High five!”

              And with that, the mystery was solved!  And we celebrated with hugs and kisses and “high fives” all around!  Just then her father strolled into the kitchen, saw the donut box on the table, and walked over to select one.
            "What?"  he exclaimed.  "No Chocolate Nutties?"

Pick o' the Day: The Grackle Catcher

(The Complete Story with Conclusion and Interactive Soundtrack)

            One more step up, and he would be able to reach a grackle.  He had climbed the electrical pole slowly, almost sloth-like, so as not to startle the birds, and he made no sound at all except for the short, raspy breaths emanating from his mouth (breathing through his nose was nearly impossible thanks to a frustratingly deviated septum and its inseparable BFF, chronic sinusitis).  As he took the final step up, he inhaled deeply and then grabbed for the nearest bird in a quick, darting movement, snagging one of its panicked legs with the thumb and index finger of his right hand as it exploded in a black flurry of flailing and flapping wings.  Pulling the bird to his chest, he tucked its tail into his armpit, hushing it into a calmed, almost catatonic state as he began making his way back down the pole.  

            After reaching the weedy ground of the parking lot island, Hank Wendt turned and scanned the area thoroughly before stepping onto the pavement.  He was extremely cautious when walking through parking lots or crossing streets, relying on his eyes to alert him to approaching dangers since his ears could not.  He was almost totally deaf in his right ear, due to an unfortunate incident that had occurred when he was a child, though he rarely spoke of it.  And after years of working as a carpenter’s helper, enduring without protection the screaming screeches of power saws and the blunt-force sonic trauma of pounding hammers, he had probably lost about half the hearing in his “good” ear.  But it was an invisible disability, and as long as he was able to position himself to the right of someone who was speaking to him, he could generally hear the bulk of a conversation.  And if, due to heavy background noise, he could not, he would simply smile and nod his head as the other person spoke.  It usually didn’t matter much, for the conversations were, as a rule, one-sided, for there weren’t many who were much interested in anything he had to say.  There were even some acquaintances who thought of him as a “good listener”, and they would walk away with a warm and therapeutic feeling after talking to him, as if they had confessed to a priest, though, unbeknownst to them, he had only pretended to hear.

            Hank began to walk, or rather, limp, with his tenth grackle of the afternoon still tucked under his arm like an avian football, into the cold, easterly breeze blowing up Blessing Street.  After coming to the end of the second block, he stopped.  The chill wind and the frigid humidity made his left leg, held together with screws and plates due to a life-shattering break a few years back, ache unmercifully, so two blocks was about as far as he could go.  Taking the bird out of the snug nest made by the crook of his arm, and holding it carefully with both hands, he whispered these words into its ears; that is, where he assumed the bird’s ears should be, though he couldn’t see them: “Fly to the woodlands, away from the city!  You’ll be much happier there!”  He then released the bird into the gusty headwind, and it flapped noisily away.  “Catch and release,” chuckled Hank.  “Catch and release.”

            Since that was just about all he could take for one day, he decided to head for home.  Catching grackles in the grocery store parking lot and humanely releasing them in another location gave him a good feeling inside, for, to him, he was doing an important act of “public service”.  He had long been disturbed by the immense flocks of grackles that, at certain times of the year, would invade the neighborhood airspace and roost on the power lines and in the trees that encircled the local shopping centers.  The sheer numbers of birds, and the accompanying cacophony of cries and caws, were horrifying to many of the residents, especially the women and children, who would hurry to the store entrances, hands clasped over their heads or ears, hoping against hope they would not get pooped on.  And good luck finding a shopping cart that had not been sullied, at least a little, by the drippy droppings of these otherwise friendly and good-natured animals.  The store owners did nothing about the problem because they thought there was nothing they could do.  But Hank Wendt did not think that way.  He did not like to hear anyone say, “Someone should do something about that.”  He believed with all his heart that problems were meant to be solved, and if he could do something about a problem, then, by golly, he would do it.

            For the last five years since his beloved mother, brother, and sister moved away, he had regularly dedicated a significant portion of each week to this humble and largely unrecognized volunteer service for his community.  And doing so went a long way towards easing the silent, but nevertheless raging, river of loneliness that relentlessly ate away at the aging infrastructure of his optimism towards life.  He had known heartbreak literally as long as he could remember, for his father left home when Hank was only three, just one month after his awakening from babyhood, and had yet to return.  His memories of the man were dim, but certain features of his father stayed with him to this day: his jet black hair, his scratchy face (straight out of Hank’s favorite book of all time, Pat the Bunny), the smoke of his Lucky Strike cigarettes wrapped around his head like a Sikh’s turban.  Precious memories.  Where his father had gone, he did not know.  His mother, if she knew, never told him, and whenever she spoke of the man she would close every sentence with the words “da bum!” as if they were a new type of end punctuation mark she had invented because neither periods nor exclamation points felt quite right.  And it was his father’s absence that had made it impossible for Hank to accompany his mother and siblings when they moved away.  “Somebody’s got to be here when Dad comes back.  Otherwise, he won’t know what happened to us!” he tearfully explained to them as they packed up the family Rambler with all their belongings.  His mother just shook her head and said, “Hank, you’re an idiot,” jammed the stick into first, and roared away into the night.  “Be sure to write!” Hank yelled, and then fell into a coughing fit from the acrid smoke left behind.

*

            So Hank stayed behind to wait for his father, but not in the old family home, with its torn screens and peeling paint and leaky roof.  His mother had sold it just before she left to an immigrant Indian family, but because she felt a little bad for him, she told him he could have the old pop-up tent trailer that had been buried for years under dusty piles of garage junk, which she had no intention of taking with her, and Hank thought that it would be just fine.  He asked his next door neighbor, an elderly Mexican widow and “crazy cat-lady” named Julia, who, for some reason unknown to Hank, pronounced her name as “Hoolia”, if he could park the small trailer in her back yard and live there until his father came back, when the both of them would then join up with the rest of the family, wherever they might be.  She said she didn’t mind, and she would even let him plug an electrical extension cord to the outlet outside her back door.  All he had to do for her, she said, was catch her some more cats.  She couldn’t be happy unless she had at least 50 of them lying around, and due to natural attrition, she would need at least one or two new ones a month.  “Hoolia” also kept a perpetual yard-sale going on in her weedy front lawn in order to raise money to feed her flock of felines, selling old clothes, knick-knacks, bric-a-brac, cracker jacks, gimcracks, baubles, trinkets, and gewgaws to a local mix of neighborhood riffraff, transients, hobos, winos, and blue-haired flea-market queens who would never pay the asking price for anything and who, if they actually had to spend more than a quarter for any one item, would walk away with a disgusted look on their sour, wrinkled faces muttering, “Too rich for my blood… too rich for my blood.”  And Hank could never figure out where “Hoolia” kept getting more things to sell; if the merchandise seemed to be dwindling, she would just go into her house and bring out another box or two to replenish the stock.  She must have hoarded literally tons of stuff over the years, and she was now slowly getting rid of it, piece by piece, for the benefit of her beloved cats.      

               Now Hank had never been on his own, and though he couldn’t imagine what it would be like to live alone; to come home at the end of a long workday to a room devoid of human life, to eat his dinner in utter silence, to go to bed without being able to say “Good night!” to anyone, to wake up the next day without being able to say “Good morning!” to anyone…  if he would have spent any amount of time really thinking about this, he would have been absolutely terrified.  But his naturally optimistic nature would not allow him to think such negative thoughts, and instead he began to think of his new situation as an “adventure”, and that, for the foreseeable future, everyday was going to be a “camp-out”.  He remembered fondly the summer of his tenth year, when he and his friend Roger would camp-out in his backyard: the two of them working all afternoon to create a tent made out of an old, paint-spattered visqueen dropcloth, using straightened wire coat hangers to roast wienies and marshmallows over a small campfire, drinking warm grape Kool-Aid out of a dented Army surplus canteen, lying on their backs in the dark, gazing at the starry night, and feeling lucky when they witnessed a meteor flashing across the sky.  That was a great summer.  But Roger drowned the next year while on a school picnic at Lake Travis, and Hank had never felt much like camping again after that.

            “Hoolia” wouldn’t grant him permission to have a campfire in her backyard, but she did give him an old microwave oven that she had planned to sell at her yard sale so that he could heat up his food.  That pretty much limited what Hank could cook on his “camp-out”, making roasted-wienies-on-a-stick out of the question.  He once tried an experiment to see if he could brown a marshmallow in it, but the Jet-Puff just turned into a sticky, white goo that stuck permanently to the oven’s bottom.  So he resigned himself to a diet that consisted primarily of Cups-O-Noodle, Pizza Pockets, and Orville Redenbacher’s “Gourmet” popcorn.  Ah, to Hank, there was nothing like Orville’s beautiful popcorn.  Light, fluffy, and buttery.  Perfect everytime.  He usually had at least five cases of the stuff stacked up in his tent trailer, for he was worried that the local grocery store would run out of it.  He thought this because he had read in the paper a while back that Orville had died tragically by drowning in his Jacuzzi, and for many, many days after reading this, Hank felt devastated.  He had come to think that Orville was a friend, and now he was drowned, just like Roger.  And soon, his popcorn would run out and be gone forever, too.

            And so it had been five years now, living on his own in a pop-up tent trailer under a spreading oak tree in “Hoolia’s” back yard, working as a carpenter’s helper for minimum wage, catching and releasing grackles for the benefit of his community, occasionally catching stray cats, expecting his father to show up any day now, and still waiting for his mother to write and tell him where she and his brother and sister had all ended up.

*

            “Hello?  Anybody home?”  Hank’s dream was, as usual, taking a weird twist.  The pack of tigers that were chasing him around the inside of his old elementary school had cornered him in the boy’s bathroom, and he was making a last stand by barricading himself in one of the stalls.  Since the flimsy aluminum door did not go all the way to the floor, he could see the immense paws of the tiger chieftain as it stood there, in front of his stall, peeking at him through the half-inch crack, and he could hear it snuffling at the lock.  And then it spoke again, this time much louder.  “I said, hello?  Anyone home?”   The tone of the tiger’s voice was so disturbingly nasty that it actually woke Hank up, and he realized, despite his mental  fogginess, that it was coming from outside his pop-up tent trailer and not from inside his head.  He tried to raise his body to a sitting position, but he found he was weighed-down by three very chubby cats, and one kitten, who were dozing on top of him.  “Come on, get off me, guys!” he rasped, his throat parched by a long night of sonorous mouth-breathing.  The cats reluctantly moseyed off to another corner of the tent and immediately went back to sleep.  Whoever was outside was now pounding on the flimsy aluminum door of the tent trailer, causing the whole rickety contraption to shake.  “Who is it?” Hank shouted as he hurriedly pulled on a faded Mighty Mouse t-shirt and a pair of hopelessly wrinkled khaki cargo shorts.

            “It’s me, Merle!  Is that you, Wendt?” said the rather unattractive and obnoxious voice outside the door.  “I gotta talk to you, man!  Open the door!”  It was Merle!  Merle Zitzky!  Hank’s nemesis since the third grade!  What in the world was he doing here?

            Hank opened the door and stepped out into the blazingly bright Saturday morning sunlight.  There stood Merle, in all his 400 pound, clip-on-tie glory, leering at him from behind a cheap pair of sunglasses and puffing on a Pall Mall, his huge man-boobs and doughy muffin-top waist puffing out his overly-tight short-sleeve shirt.  Merle was an assistant manager at the neighborhood B-U-T-T-S Superstore (affectionately called “Big BUTTS” by the grocery-shopping locals), a position that had taken him three times longer to attain than most other employees who had similar aspirations, but it was a position that he, nevertheless, had finally attained.  And standing next to him was one of the store’s crack security guards, Lester Guy, a skinny, pimply-faced toad, who was trying to look mean and tough, even though, as usual, his zipper was down.

            For a moment, Hank felt dizzy as a series of long-repressed memories flashed through his cerebral cortex: encountering Merle for the first time in 3^rd grade when they were both approximately the same size; Merle challenging him to a fight after school; Merle wanting to box not knowing that Hank was a skilled rassler; Hank showing Merle that rassling always trumps boxing by putting Merle in an unescapable headlock and causing his nose to bleed; Hank finding that Merle left him alone for a long time after that; Merle then proceeding to grow at twice the rate of a typical elementary school student; Merle using his gargantuan size to gleefully terrorize everyone in the school, including the teachers; Merle dropping out of school in 9^th grade (thankfully) and then disappearing for a long time, only to return to the neighborhood years later as a semi-sobered-up night stocker at B-U-T-T-S.  Hank shook his head to stop the flashbacks, then looked up again at his two unwelcome visitors and asked, “What do you want?”

            Merle was definitely there for a reason, but he was in no hurry to reveal it.  “So this is where you live, huh Hank?”  he sneered.  “I heard rumors you lived in a tent, but I didn’t believe it ‘til now.”  Hank did not respond, but he knew then this encounter wasn’t going to end well.  Merle looked disappointed that he didn’t get the response he was looking for, so he decided to get to the point.  “Look man, it’s about the birds.  You need to stop messin’ with ‘em.”  He took another drag on his cigarette, looked at Lester, and smiled.  Lester did his best to maintain his scary face.

            “I’m just helping you guys out by encouraging the birds to leave.  Your customers are happier, and the birds are happier, too,” said Hank, calmly, though he felt his blood pressure rising fast.  “It’s better than doing nothing, ain’t it?”  Merle and Lester started snickering, and then they both broke out into full-fledged laughter.  “You ain’t doin’ nothin’ catchin’ them things,” chortled Lester, breaking his silence.  “I take care of three times more of ‘em than you every night.”  He patted the pellet gun holstered to his belt and grinned.  “Whaddya think of that?”

            Hank felt his hands turning into fists, but he kept his arms at his sides.  “I think you need to leave.”  Merle took another drag, blew the smoke on Hank, and said, “You stop messin’ with them birds.  We see you messin’ with ‘em again, we’re goin’ to kick your ass.”  He flicked his cigarette butt toward the tent trailer.  “Let’s go, Lester.”  The two of them walked away, laughing.  Hank watched them exit the backyard and then looked towards the house.  He saw “Hoolia” looking out her back screen door with a frown on her face.  Evidently, she had witnessed the unpleasant encounter, and Hank hoped he hadn’t caused her any worries.  What he didn’t see was “Hoolia” silently uncocking her Glock 19 semi-automatic as she returned to her kitchen.

            He turned and wearily sat down on a weathered lawn chair.  He put his hands over his face, feeling as if life had just sucker-punched him in the gut again.  His attempt at meaningful public service was important to him, and he didn’t want to stop doing it.  And to think what would happen to the birds if he wasn’t there to convince them to leave for a better place than the B-U-T-T-S parking lot.  Unbearable.  Tears began forming under his closed eyelids.  And then the first whiff of smoke hit his nostrils.  It smelled like burning canvas!  Jumping to his feet, he turned to his pop-up tent trailer and gasped!  It was on fire!

*

            “FIRE!” yelled Hank.  “OH, NO!”  The ancient, dried-out canvas that formed the sides and ends of his humble shelter was ablaze!  The first things that came to his mind were “THE CATS!”, and then “THE POPCORN!”  He grabbed at the trailer’s door and yanked it open.  Immediately, the three full-grown cats flew out, hitting him in rapid-fire succession as if they were shot out of a semi-automatic cat-gun, and knocking him down to the ground in the process.  Hank immediately picked himself back up and dove into the trailer, keeping low to avoid the dark cloud of choking smoke that was quickly filling the upper half of the small living space.  He heard the frantic mewing of the kitten in a far corner of his bed, and he crawled to it, ignoring the hot ashes falling like blazing snowflakes onto his head.  He then cradled the tiny, terrified tabby in the crook of his right arm, in much the same way he would a grackle, and because of this, he had to crawl back out using a sort of side-stroke swimming technique to pull himself along the floor using only his left arm.  Reaching the doorway again, he slid out headfirst straight to the ground, gave the kitten a gentle toss into a tuft of green grass, and started rolling in the dirt, thinking for sure he was on fire himself.  Finding that not to be the case, Hank sat back up, wiped his eyes, and started back to the trailer.  He had to get the popcorn out of there before it blew!  There were at least five cases of Orville Redenbachers’s stacked on a small counter next to the little microwave, and if the intense heat of the out-of-control fire made it all go off at once… a horribly vivid mental picture formed in his mind of a gigantic, Jiffy-Pop-like mushroom cloud erupting tens of thousands of feet into the sky out of “Hoolia’s” back yard, followed by a devastating shock wave leveling the entire impoverished neighborhood, followed by a light, buttery fallout raining down upon the smoking ruins!  Hank could not, would not, let this happen!

            Just as he was about to throw himself back into the burning trailer, a sudden blast of ice-cold water hit him in the back, just below the shoulder blades, and the unexpected shock of it made him let out a girlish shriek as he jumped about three feet into the air!  Upon landing, he turned around and immediately got it right in the face.  “Stop it!” he spluttered, waving his hands blindly in the air, not knowing what was going on.  The assault on his face ceased, and Hank, wiping and blinking the water out of his eyes, discovered it was “Hoolia” doing the shooting.  She was standing there wide-eyed, with garden hose and high-pressure nozzle in hand, and she was now spraying down his legs.  He understood then what she was doing.  She knew he had to go back into the burning trailer, and that there would be no talking him out of it, so she was wetting him down first.  This could buy him a few more seconds, maybe.  He was soon completely sopping, and she looked satisfied with her work, so she lowered the hose, made the Sign of the Cross, and said, “Vaya con Dios, Hank Wendt!”  Then she turned her attention and the full force of the hose onto the raging fire.

            Back into the mini-inferno he went!  He would have to try to hold his breath, for there was no air left in the smoke-filled trailer, and he certainly could not see anything.  But he knew where the popcorn was stacked, and before you could say “John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt”, all five cases, one after the other, were quickly heaved out.  And right behind the last one came Hank, coughing uncontrollably, carrying the microwave oven under his left arm and his treasure box under his right.  After taking three wobbly steps away from the trailer, he collapsed.  And then everything went dark…

*

            …and he found himself back in junior high school.  Seventh grade, to be exact.  That was a pretty good year, if he remembered it correctly.  He was 12 years old and almost a teen-ager.  He had finally reached 100 pounds on the bathroom scale.  He had a new, metallic-green Schwinn Sting-Ray with a banana seat as his cool new ride, purchased with the $62.50 he had earned and saved doing odd jobs around the neighborhood for an entire summer.  And it was the year he got married to Evangeline.

            He could never forget the first time he laid eyes on her.  It was the middle of April, and he was sitting in 1^st period English class, fourth row, fifth chair back, feeling himself drifting in and out, as the teacher droned on and on and on about the finer points of the (ultimately futile) parsing of sentences.  And then there was a sharp knock at the classroom door, rousing Hank from his dazed and confused state.  As he and the rest of the class turned their heads to look, in walked the frumpy school counselor followed by what many might say was a rather thin, almost skinny, girl with a mouth full of braces, who seemed, at first, to be extremely shy.  But to Hank, who instinctively sat up straight in his desk, she was, to put it simply, the most beautiful creature he had ever seen: a girl with long, silky brunette hair, gorgeous brown eyes, and a devastatingly lovely face.  She was looking down at the floor, her crossed arms holding her notebook to her chest, as the counselor introduced her to the teacher, who seemed a bit peeved to have to add another student to the roll so late in the school year.  The counselor soon left, and the teacher, still obviously irked by the unforeseen interruption of her cherished grammar lesson, rather hastily introduced the girl to the class as Evangeline Martinez and directed her to take the empty seat directly behind Hank.

            To the rest of the class, it was definitely no big deal.  The other boys seemed disinterested at best, and the other girls were not going to be in any big hurry to make friends with the pretty new girl, especially this late in the school year.  But Hank could feel his heart rate rising as Evangeline made her way down the aisle, and to his totally unexpected delight, she smiled so very sweetly at him as she walked by on her way to her seat, and he almost fainted because of it!  Beads of sweat formed on his clammy forehead as he stared straight ahead, and he neither saw nor heard anything else for a few minutes until his heart rate started slowing down.  And when it finally did, he realized that no other girl he had ever known had made him feel the way she did.  And all it took was a smile!

            More than three school days passed before Hank finally worked up the courage to introduce himself properly to Evangeline, and they hit it off right away after that.  He was thrilled that she let him show her around the school and escort her to her classes (even though she was perfectly capable of finding her way around on her own).  They enjoyed lunch together every day, and they marveled at how similar their tastes were in agreeing that the Sloppy Joes were, in regards to school lunches, the absolute best.  Hank once even refused to eat his meager helping of Apple Crisp, which was the highlight of Thursday lunches; instead offering it to Evangeline so that she could have twice the enjoyment of the sweet apple-y delight.  And he gave her the deluxe tour of the school’s small library, guiding her through the fascinating reference section, with its huge atlases and gigantic globe, the non-fiction area with its fact books of nearly every country in the world, and, finally, his favorite, the young adult fiction area.  He had pretty much read everything in this part of the library, many of the books at least twice, so she asked him to pick out a good one for her to check-out.  After giving it some thought, he selected Misty of Chincoteague, reasoning that most girls liked ponies, and this wild pony story was extremely well-written, especially in its vivid descriptions of things such as the white spot on Misty’s side that was shaped like the United States.

            Evangeline had actually read this book before, in third grade, but she didn’t tell Hank this for fear that it would hurt his feelings.  She had noticed that Hank was often teased and made fun of by the other students in class.  She would cringe when, at least once a day, she heard other kids loudly call out, “Where’s Hank Wendt?” right in front of him, and to which he would reply, “I ain’t went nowhere!  I’m right here!”, never getting why they would always laugh at his earnest answer.  She could tell he was not from a well-to-do family, and she didn’t care.  He was the only person at her new school who had made an effort to make her feel welcome, and he treated her, day in and day out, like she was the most important person in the world.  When he looked at her, it was always with a smile, and she couldn’t help but be touched by that.

            They soon began to regard each other as best friends, which seemed a bit strange to both of them since neither one had even had a single friend of the opposite gender before.  They were basically inseparable during the school day, but they parted ways every afternoon when Evangeline took the school bus home.  Hank had no idea where she lived, and even if he did, he would not have been allowed to visit her, for his mother forbade him from leaving their neighborhood on his own.  So for the last two months of the academic year, Hank’s interest in going to school was magically revived; so much, in fact, that his mother was overheard more than once saying, “What the hell’s up with him?” as he peeled rubber down the driveway after inexplicably forsaking his bowl of lumpy oatmeal to get an early start on his school day.  And as for Evangeline, there was no way her parents would have permitted her to have a “boyfriend” at her age, nor would any boy have been allowed to visit her at their home for any reason whatsoever.  So everything Hank and Evangeline had together, they had at school, so they simply made the best of it.

            Time just flew by, and the second-to-last day of school, the day that was universally regarded by all of the seventh graders as the very best day of the school year, verily the day of the long-awaited and eagerly anticipated social event of all social events, soon arrived.  It was the day in which they celebrated the end of the academic year with a day-long field trip to the fabulous Roll-A-Rama roller skating rink.  Talk about the makings of a perfect day!  Roller skating, popcorn, Cherry Cokes, and more roller skating!  The school bus was absolutely atwitter with excitement as it rolled away from the ancient, brown brick junior high, full of chattering and near-hysterical 12 year olds, and even the adult chaperones were in a rare good mood.  Boys and girls were not allowed to sit together on the bus, so Hank sat with the other boys and Evangeline sat with the other girls, but they both snuck surreptitious glances at each other when they thought no one else was looking.  Upon arrival at the rink, everybody piled off, and after the initial chaos of paying admission fees and obtaining their skates, the skate-a-palooza began!  And it was wonderful!  Loud rock music, strobe lights, nachos, extreme wipeouts… there were not enough superlatives in the English language, at that time, to adequately describe the joyous thrills experienced by the tickled teenyboppers.

            But even this day had a special highlight all its own, and that was the romantic skate/song for couples, the one that gave the girls the opportunity to ask the boys to skate with them for the duration of a hit song, and it was considered a high honor for a boy to be even asked.  The deejay gave the girls less than one minute to find a partner, so it was a crazy bit of pandemonium while most everyone paired up.  In the middle of this exciting chaos, Hank’s eyes searched anxiously for Evangeline.  And finally he saw her. Their eyes locked as she rolled straight up to him with her right hand outstretched.  She came to a squeaky, but expertly executed, stop right in front of him, took his hand in hers, and sweetly asked him if he would skate with her.  Though his heart was beating like a tom-tom, he somehow managed to remember his manners, and he whispered in her ear that he would be honored.  So off they went, hand-in-hand, and began gliding around the floor to the tune of Chicago’s “Colour My World”.  Hank marveled at how dead-on the lyrics described the way he was feeling:

            As time goes on I realize just what you mean to me.  And now, now that you’re near, promise the love that I’ve waited to share, and dreams of our moment together.  Colour my world with hope of loving you.  Listen to "Colour My World".

Holding her hand as they went round and round, neither of them minding the sweat building up between their clasped palms, was the closest thing to heaven Hank had ever experienced, and for exactly two minutes and fifty-nine seconds he knew true happiness.

            And then that special moment they had together was gone, and the deejay began playing a loud and scratchy version of “Dizzy” by Tommy Roe.  Listen to "Dizzy".  The skating floor immediately filled up again, and the sudden influx of annoying knuckleheads going way too fast made it unsafe for the two of them to continue skating together.  So they veered off the floor and made their unsteady way to an open bench where they could sit together and catch their breath.  Hank was so caught up in the moment, so overcome with a feeling of love towards Evangeline, that he turned to her and asked, rather impulsively, if they could be married.  And she immediately said they could.  And so, in both of their minds, they were.  And that was that.

            After about its hundredth key change, “Dizzy” faded away, and the deejay announced that that had been the final song, and he thanked everyone for coming, and now everyone would have to leave.  The lights came up, the skates came off, and the satisfied seventh-graders filed out of the building and back onto the school bus.  Now that the best day of his life was over, Hank felt a strange sadness all the way back to school, though by all rights he knew he should have been very happy.  After seeing Evangeline safely off on the late bus, he rode his Sting-Ray home.  He didn’t mention to his mom or his siblings that he had gotten married, fearing they would laugh at him, so he quietly ate his supper of potato pie and went to bed.

            The next day was the last day of school.  Hank didn’t even bother pretending to eat his breakfast, and instead he ran out the back door and pedaled to school as fast as he could, hoping to be there when Evangeline’s bus pulled-up.  Knowing this would be their last day together before summer vacation, and not knowing exactly how they were going to get to see each other during the next three months, he had spent all night planning in his mind how he was going to make the day extra special for her.  The first thing on the agenda would be escorting her from the bus to their first period class.  Luckily, he got there just as her bus was arriving, so he didn’t even bother to lock his bike in the rack.  Instead, he ran to the bus loading area, took his place next to the open bus door, and waited expectantly for her to get off.  As a motley assortment of bleary-eyed middle- schoolers straggled off, Hank was mildly shocked to discover that Evangeline was not among them.  He then thought that maybe he had the wrong bus, so he stuck his head in the doorway and asked the bus driver if this was the bus that Evangeline Martinez rode.  The bus driver, a grizzled and grumpy-looking old man, said that yes, this was her bus.  He asked Hank what his name was, and when Hank told him, the old man handed him a curiously folded piece of college-ruled notebook paper that had Hank’s name written on it in Evangeline’s beautiful cursive handwriting.  The old man told Hank that he was asked to deliver the note to him, and that now that he had, Hank could get the hell off the bus.

            Hank was mystified as the bus rumbled away.  Why hadn’t Evangeline come to school?  What was this note?  He hurriedly undid the intricately-folded note with shaking hands and read the following message:

Dear Hank,

            Oh, Hank.  I’m so sorry!  My father told us last night that we are moving away today.  He said we are going to California, but he didn’t say where.  He won’t let me come to school today because he says we have to leave right away.  Oh Hank!  I don’t think I will ever get to see you again!  We will have to get a divorce!  Check YES or NO if you agree or not.  Oh Hank, it doesn’t matter what you check!  I’m so sorry!  Goodbye.  I love you!

                                                                                                               Evangeline

Hank stood there on the sidewalk with his mouth agape, unable to move, and unable to comprehend what had just happened to him.  The tardy bell rang, and Hank didn’t hear it.  It was close to an hour before he could move again, and when he could, he silently walked to the bike rack, slowly mounted his Sting-Ray, and pedaled himself home.  When he got there, he went straight to his bed and cried himself to sleep.

            And when he woke up, he was lying face down in the mud in “Hoolia’s” backyard and he was weeping.  Not for the loss of his pop-up tent trailer home, nor for the loss of almost everything he owned.  He was weeping for the loss of his beloved Evangeline.  He missed her so.

*

    

            Hank had no choice but to try to salvage what he could, which was very little, from the burned-out and water-soaked hulk of the pop-up tent trailer he had called home for the last five years so that he could start the rebuilding process, for there was nowhere else he could go.  To his dismay, he found that the flames and water had destroyed his foam mattress and, worse, his cherished, though heavily drool-stained, pillow on which his head had rested for the last 15 years (which could hardly even be called a pillow since it was so flat that he had to fold it over twice in order for his head to be slightly raised).  His less-than-extensive wardrobe of irregular jeans, cargo shorts, and old-favorite t-shirts was ruined, effectively leaving him with nothing more than what he was currently wearing.  His single pair of solid white, extra-wide Adidas tennies, his only pair of shoes, was melted to the floor, but Hank considered it a bit of luck that his classic and virtually indestructible Mexican huaraches, made of thick, braided leather, with soles cut from a rubber automobile tire, had been left outside.  His tiny, 13-inch black and white TV was a total loss, but that didn’t really matter because it had mysteriously stopped receiving a useful television signal about two years before.

            As was noted earlier, he had made a point of saving his microwave from the calamitous conflagration (since being able to eat was important to him), as well as his precious treasure box.  This small, intricately carved, walnut-stained box, which he had designed and built himself in high school shop class, contained everything that meant something to him, including (among a myriad of other small artifacts of his childhood) a fire agate he had found on a hike, some of his baby teeth the tooth fairy apparently didn’t want, a Lincoln penny from the year of his birth, a two-dollar bill, a curiously striped feather, an arrowhead he had dug-up from the dirt while playing cars and trucks on the side of his house, a wrinkled wallet-sized picture of his mother, and the intricately-folded, tear-stained, and yellowed-with-age note from Evangeline.  He had literally walked through fire to save this box, for there was no way he would have left it behind.  To him, it was the record of his life, the only real proof to himself of his existence on this planet.  He was heartened by the fact that it was safe, and for this reason, he believed he could go on.                       

            Because he had so few real friends, which was understandable since he was not on Facebook or anything, no one but “Hoolia” knew what had happened to him, and she offered what humble help she could.  She gave him a blue tarp and some rope so that he could improvise a crude shelter over his head.  She also gave him an ancient air mattress to sleep on.  Unfortunately, it had a slow, almost imperceptible leak so that it gradually deflated during the night, and Hank awoke each morning flat on his aching back on the cold, hard floor.  She also offered a box of her deceased husband’s clothes for him to wear until he could get to Goodwill to buy some newer, more up-to-date replacements.  Hank was a bit mystified when he opened the box, which consisted of two pairs of more-than-fifty-year-old, pin-striped, train-engineer-style bib overalls, four musty-smelling plaid long-sleeved shirts, and an obviously well-worn red union suit.  But he was plenty warm when he put them on, so he was grateful for the gift.  To show his appreciation to “Hoolia” for helping him rebuild his home and wardrobe, Hank spent the next two evenings after work catching her some extra stray cats from the vacant lots in the neighborhood.  “Hoolia” seemed genuinely touched by his efforts and, with teary eyes, accepted the cats saying, “Gracias..., gracias!”   She even gave Hank a hug.

            And now that he was set back up in relative comfort, Hank made a momentous decision.  Despite the fact he was threatened with bodily harm by Merle and Lester if he did so, he resolved to continue his efforts to relocate the thousands of grackles that still overran the B-U-T-T-S parking lot.  He could not imagine ending his efforts to do this public service, for this was his way to give back for all the wonderful things his country had done for him.  And he also did this for the grackles, too.  He was disappointed in them hanging around the local grocery stores and fast-food outlets, scrounging and fighting for dropped French fries, Cheetoes, and ice-cream cones, and terrorizing the shoppers as if they were overly-aggressive transients or hoboes.  It hurt him to think that such magnificent creatures would stoop so low, like sea gulls at the local landfill, as to behave in this unnatural manner.  And he shuddered to think what Lester, with Merle’s blessing, was doing to them every night with his pellet gun.  He had to convince the birds to leave, one way or another, even if the best he could do was help only one bird at a time.

            So that evening, Hank returned to the B-U-T-T-S parking lot with his step ladder, resolved to catch as many grackles as he could and order them to fly to the woodlands outside of the city where he believed they truly belonged.  As long as there were store customers around, he reasoned, he would be safe from any attack by Merle or Lester.  And he was right.  Lester, who was cruising the parking lot in his rather dirty and beat-up looking Segway while simultaneously picking his nose, spotted Hank right away.  He immediately scooted over to the store entrance and ran in to find Merle.  A few moments later, they both walked out together and watched Hank from behind the display of cheap charcoal grills.  And as they watched, they spoke to each other in low, evil-sounding tones that were interspersed with cackling laughs.  Together they formulated an ingenious plan that, if it worked, would ensure that Hank would get it good, and there would be no pesky witnesses around to complicate things for them.  All they had to do was wait for the sun to go down, and if Hank was still there, they would do it then.  “This is gonna be great!” snorted Merle.  He turned, spat something green and disgusting onto the wall, wiped his mouth on his shirt sleeve, and casually strolled back into the store.  Lester just grinned and patted his gun.

*

            The strange feeling of urgency that had come over him kept Hank going longer than usual with his public service, and he hadn’t even noticed that almost four hours had passed since the sun had set.  He had never before caught and released so many grackles in one evening, and though he hadn’t kept a running tally, he figured it was more than 20 birds for sure.  The darkness was making his job even more treacherous than usual, and the parking lot was emptying rapidly, so he decided to wrap it up for the night.  As he struggled to fold-up his stepladder, he heard a zombie-like shuffling sound coming up behind him.  Quickly turning around, Hank was relieved to find himself face-to-face with Homeless Bob, a long-time acquaintance.  Homeless Bob, a lowly and disheveled old man with one tooth and a severe limp, who looked to be about 99 years old but who was probably, in reality, only pushing 60, was a harmless scrounge.  He scrounged the trashcans for aluminum cans and edible food.  He scrounged occasional free meals from kind-hearted neighborhood widows like “Hoolia”.  And, when he had to, he scrounged the parking lots asking people for their spare change.  Hank felt sorry for him and always gave Homeless Bob whatever he had in his pocket.  Seeing how bad off the poor man was never failed to make Hank thankful to God for how good he had it.  Once, about three years before, Hank, overcome by feelings of empathy, had even invited Homeless Bob to spend Christmas Eve night with him in his cramped pop-up tent trailer.  After they shared a meal of pizza pockets and popcorn, he let Homeless Bob sleep on the cushy foam mattress while he slept on the floor.  But when he woke up in the morning, Homeless Bob was gone.  Hank tracked him down later that day and asked him why he had left so soon, and Homeless Bob told him that he had to leave because he wasn’t used to sleeping in such luxurious digs.

            “Hey, Homeless Bob!” said Hank in as energetic a greeting as he could muster.  “How you doin’?”  But Homeless Bob didn’t answer him, and Hank saw that he looked sad and worried.  “What’s the matter?”  Homeless Bob’s face went from sad and worried to really, really, pathetically sad and worried, and his eyes were red and welling-up with tears.  Then the old man spoke.  “Hank!  Listen, Hank… I…,” and then he grabbed Hank by his bib-overall straps.  “I gotta tell you something!”  “What?” demanded Hank, alarmed at the desperate look in Homeless Bob’s eyes.  He had never seen the old man in such an agitated state before, and he again demanded to know what the matter was.

            “There’s… there’s a bird, Hank.  A bird that’s hurt.  Back behind the store,” stammered Homeless Bob.  “You need to go and help that bird, Hank!”  He let go of Hank’s overall straps, crumpled to the ground, and started weeping.  He then abruptly stood up and began shuffling away.  “Hey, wait a minute,” shouted Hank.  “Where you goin’?”  Homeless Bob said nothing else.  And he kept moving at a surprisingly fast pace until he was well out of sight.  What Homeless Bob had neglected to say, what he couldn’t bring himself to say, indeed, what he was ordered not to say, was that Merle and Lester had threatened to knock out his only remaining tooth if he didn’t give Hank the message about the bird.  And Homeless Bob was so ashamed of himself for having to do what he did that he shuffled himself out of the neighborhood that night and was never seen again.

            “Now that’s weird,” said Hank to himself.  He turned back and surveyed the almost-totally abandoned grocery store parking lot.  He was exhausted and hungry, and he wanted to go home.  But then he thought about the injured bird that Homeless Bob said was back behind the store.  He had never dealt with an injured grackle before, and he wasn’t sure what he would even do with it when he found it, but he knew he had no choice but to go back there and try to help it in some way.  If he didn’t, either Lester or a cat would find it for sure, and Hank didn’t want either of those things to happen.  So he picked-up his stepladder and made his way around the store to the poorly-lit and eerily-empty loading docks.  Figuring the bird would be cowering behind something in an attempt to protect itself, Hank began poking around the ubiquitous stacks of empty milk crates that towered ominously over him.  And as he did, he listened intently with his “good” ear for any sounds that might give away the bird’s location.  But then he heard something that he didn’t expect to hear, something that sounded like a sad, ghostly, whining, sighing sound that would start, then stop, then start again.  It reminded Hank of flatulent gas escaping from a person who was desperately, but unsuccessfully, trying to hold it in… someone… like… Merle!  Hank’s head jerked up just as he heard Merle’s voice, along with the thunderous reverberations of the violent release of the rest of the pent-up fart, shouting “NOW!”, and then the entire stack of milk crates, in a cascading  avalanche of plastic cubes, came crashing down upon him.  And once again, Hank’s world faded to black.

            And though Merle and Lester thought no one had seen what they had done to Hank, there was, unbeknownst to them, one witness to their violent and cowardly assault.  A witness that was silently perched high above them on top of the one floodlight that bathed the area in a pale yellow gloom.  And this witness watched as Merle and Lester snuck back into the grocery store through the back door without checking on Hank’s welfare, without knowing or even caring if he was still alive.  And this witness, after taking in the entire scene, leapt off the light and flapped into the darkness.  And that very night, the B-U-T-T-S parking lot was quietly abandoned by the thousands of grackles that had invaded and overwhelmed it for the last two months.

*

            When morning finally came, it came cloaked in sadness and gloom, for though the sun rose as usual, its warming rays could barely penetrate the roiling thunderclouds that threatened to unleash an angry torrent upon the city.  But for the time being, they only threatened, as if some unknown, yet more powerful, force was holding them back.  And they held back, grudgingly, though not quietly, with grumbles and growls of low thunder signaling their growing impatience.

            And it was in this dismal early morning gloom that a milk truck driver was forced to stop ten feet from the loading dock as he was backing up because of the enormous pile of jumbled milk crates that blocked his way.  After letting go with a few choice curses, he climbed down from the cab and started restacking the crates.  As the pile began to shrink, he heard a faint moaning coming from its base, and he realized, to his shock, that someone was trapped underneath!  He immediately called for help, and with the assistance of a couple of B-U-T-T-S night stockers, he quickly uncovered the body of an unconscious man who was curiously dressed in old-fashioned bib overalls, over a red union suit, with brown leather huaraches covering his otherwise bare feet.  They called for an ambulance, and in a matter of minutes, the man was being hauled away by paramedics in search of a hospital that was willing to take on yet another, painfully obvious, charity case.  One after the other declined to accept the patient, saying they were “full up” or giving some other lame excuse.  Finally, the paramedics, close to panicking due to the fact that the man’s vital signs were rapidly deteriorating, decided to take him to the only place from which they had never been turned away, an obscure facility called The Blessing Street Shelter for the Chronically Hopeless that tended to the poorest of the poor, the most forlorn derelicts and outcasts of the city, where most came in such serious shape that they were beyond hope for a cure, but who were given, at least, the chance to die with a bit of dignity under the care of a gentle and sympathetic volunteer staff.

            By noon, the B-U-T-T-S parking lot was again beginning to fill up with shoppers, but the eeriness caused by the ominous and oppressive storm clouds, compounded by the mysterious absence of the grackles, caused many to decide to turn around and leave before even getting out of their cars.  Lester Guy, late as usual, began his afternoon shift by cruising around the lot on his Segway.  Because he thought they made him look cool, he refused to take off his sunglasses, but the gloom caused by the impending storm made it difficult for him to see and caused him to run into more than one stray shopping cart.  Merle Zitsky arrived shortly after Lester, went directly into the store, and shut himself up in his office.

            At the same time, more than twenty miles away, in a lush, green forest of ancient Loblolly Pines, there arose into the sky a different sort of dark cloud than the type that currently blanketed the region.  And this cloud, immense by any standards, began to move in a flowing, undulating, but nevertheless deliberate manner towards the city.  As it moved, it stretched itself into a thinner, and eventually miles-long, line of black, flapping wings.  When it began crossing over a highway, hundreds of people pulled over and got out of their cars to watch the unprecedented movement of more than a million grackles, and many of the people wept and crossed themselves as it took more than an hour to pass over them, like a biblical plague heading directly for the heart of the city.

            After crashing into his fifth shopping cart, Lester finally resigned himself to taking off his sunglasses.  And when he did so, he noticed that the few shoppers in the parking lot were standing, looking, and pointing at the eastern sky.  He looked to where they were pointing, and it was then that he saw the strange, fast-moving black cloud that was rapidly approaching.  As he stood there, mouth agape, the plague of grackles arrived with a roar of flapping wings and ear-deafening screeches.  The lead birds began to circle high above the parking lot as the rest poured in, eventually creating a great and terrible tornado-like vortex that terrified the shoppers and caused them to run for cover.  Lester was frozen with fear, and in his terror, he did not realize, until it was too late, that he had become the very center of the whirlwind.  Despite his growing panic, he remembered that he was carrying a sidearm.  He drew it and pointed it at the sky, but before he could pull the trigger, a grackle dove and knocked it from his shaking hands.  And then a devastating downpour of hot and sticky-white bird droppings descended upon him from above, coating him from head to toe, as he futilely attempted to fend it off with flailing arms.  He screamed and then began to run, but he slipped and fell before he went ten feet and was immediately covered by hundreds of vicious and angrily pecking birds.  Within a minute, his screams were silenced, but the pecking went on for at least fifteen more.  And when the feathered mass rose back up and joined the swirling vortex, nothing was left of Lester but a skeleton inside of a uniform, and it had been picked as clean as a whistle.

            The few customers inside the B-U-T-T-S store, along with every employee on the premises, were watching in horror as Lester met his doom.  But none were as shocked, as terror-stricken, or as filled with dread as Merle, who had run out of his office to join the near-hysterical crowd of onlookers when he began hearing their screams.  As he, along with the rest, witnessed the demise of Lester, he alone knew and understood what was really happening, and why.  And he knew the birds would be after him, too.  After all, one does not keep a million grackles, swarming and swirling in a stupendously powerful whirlwind, waiting outside for long.  Already, the wind and vibrations generated by the birds were shaking, and cracking, the glass storefront.  Suddenly, one of the largest panes of glass shattered to pieces, and in flew a slew of grackle scouts, swooping and diving above the fleeing crowd, looking for one human in particular.  And that human was high-tailing to the back of the store, knocking others to the floor as he did so, including any little old lady who had the audacity to get in his way.  One large woman he knocked over was carrying an umbrella, so he grabbed it, along with her overcoat, that he had to yank off her body, before ducking through the double doors that were marked with an “employees only” sign.  He hurriedly pulled on the woman’s overcoat as he ran to the back door of the building.  Panting, he cracked the door open and peeked outside.  Seeing no birds, he opened the umbrella and, holding it close over his head, stepped out onto the loading dock with the intent of trying to make it to his car, which was parked in the employees’ lot approximately 50 yards from the back door.

            He fought the urge to run so as to avoid drawing the birds’ attention, and he was more than half way to his car when he sensed a sudden and drastic atmospheric change.  Turning back to look, Merle watched in horrified amazement as the great and terrible grackle tornado moved with a roar over the top of the big-box store, blowing dust and debris everywhere as it came directly at him.  It moved with a speed he could not match, and in an instant, he found himself, like Lester before him, trapped in the eye of the storm.  But, unlike Lester, who had received his justice there on the ground, Merle discovered that the grackles had a different punishment planned for him.  The umbrella was jerked from his hands, and he felt his arms pulled up and out as they were tugged on by countless birds.  In a moment there were flapping grackles clinging to every square inch of his body, with more grackles on top of those, and more on top of those, until he felt his body lifting off the pavement.  He was utterly helpless as he was taken up into the air, and in seconds he found he was hundreds of feet above the tree tops.  And then they let him go.  And for the few seconds of his screaming freefall, he futilely flapped his arms in a comically bird-like fashion.  And after he came to his horrific end, they picked his broken and bloody body up in the same manner as before and dropped it from a thousand feet one more time, just for good measure.

            Then it was over.  The raging whirlwind of grackles quickly dissipated in less than a minute as the birds flew away in all directions.  And soon after they were gone, the skies flashed with lightning and crackled with thunder, and the long-threatened, but ultimately earth-cleansing, deluge of rain began to fall.

*

           

            The Blessing Street Shelter for the Chronically Hopeless had only one bed available when the paramedics brought in the semi-conscious (and curiously dressed) man, and it was located next to the janitorial supply closet at the far end of the nursing ward.  After the doctors stabilized him, he was left in the care of the nurses, who checked on him as often as they could.  The only piece of identification they could find on him was a generic I.D. card that must have come with his cheap leather wallet when it was purchased.  It had the name “Hank Wendt” written on it in a shaky, child-like, cursive script under the printed words “If found, please return to”.  There was no address on the card.  The thin wallet also contained three dollars, a B-U-T-T-S discount card, and an old and worn fortune cookie message that said, “Your father still loves you and is always with you.  Remember that!”  So they put his name down as “Hank Wendt” on his charts, hoping to maybe get some more information about him when or if he ever regained consciousness. 

            The ward held a total of ten beds, and they were usually occupied by anonymous indigents so seriously ill that even they knew they were beyond help, but who were nevertheless grateful to have a bit of comfort and compassion as they went through the agonizing process of dying.  They typically had no family or friends to be with them in their final hours, but they never died alone at this shelter, for it was staffed by a few loving volunteers who would sit by their bedsides and talk softly to them and hold their hands and pat their foreheads with cool washcloths.  One of the volunteers, a very sweet woman with a touch of gray in her long, brown hair, and who everyone called “Evie”, arrived for her shift a little before 11:00 pm.  Unlike the others, Evie preferred to work the night shift, feeling it was the time when her humble efforts could best be put to use, for it was often in the wee hours of the night that the patients suffered the most, whether from pain or from fear or from loneliness.  Since Evie lived alone, there was no one pressuring her to be home at night, and she could keep herself occupied by being there for those who needed her help the most.  She was also bilingual, and she had studied hard over the years studying medical terminology in two languages in order to be able to interpret for both the English-speaking doctors and the patients at the shelter who only spoke Spanish.  For this she received no pay and no recognition, but that didn’t matter to her.  It was her way of giving back to her community, and it was important to her, and she didn’t want to stop doing it.

            She always checked-in with the nurses before going into the ward so she could find out who was who and what was what.  The nurses briefed her on the events of the day and the conditions of the patients, and the big news today was that a (probably homeless) man, dressed as an old-time train engineer, was brought in with a serious head injury.  Though his condition was stable, he was drifting in and out of consciousness, sometimes ranting about an “injured grackle”, but never waking-up fully.  Evie asked them what his name was, and they told her that they thought it was “Hank” something.  Upon hearing this, Evie’s eyes widened a bit as the name triggered an old memory in the back of her mind.  “Hank who?” she asked timidly.  The nurse checked the chart again and said, “Hank Wendt.”

            Evie’s jaw dropped from the shock!  “Where is he?” she demanded to know.  “Where’s Hank Wendt?”  The nurse, a bit taken aback by Evie’s manner, pointed to the the ward and said, “Bed 10.”  But Evie didn’t hear her because she had already run out of the station and into the ward, and she could be heard by all as she shouted “Where’s Hank Wendt?” at least three more times as she hurriedly scanned the faces of all the patients.  She stopped suddenly when she came to the last bed, and she became very quiet.  She stood there, taking in the sight of the poor man with his head wrapped in bandages, and though she hadn’t seen him for years and years, she knew it was her Hank.  And as she stood there, unable to speak, Hank’s eyes fluttered and opened ever so slightly.  He moaned a little, and then he rasped in a weak voice, “I ain’t went nowhere.  I’m right here!”

            Quickly she knelt by his side, and with a gentle hand began lovingly caressing his cheek.  “Oh, Hank,” she said, ever so sweetly, as tears fell from her eyes.  “It’s me.  Evangeline.”  Hank’s eyes opened slowly, and he turned to gaze upon her face.  And once more he saw a beautiful girl with long, silky brunette hair, gorgeous brown eyes, and a devastatingly lovely face.  He smiled and slowly raised his hand to caress her cheek in return.  And, somewhere deep within him, a tiny little ember of life that had been so close to fading out suddenly began glowing with a new energy.  “Evangeline.  Is it really you?” he asked in a whisper.  “Yes, Hank.  It’s me,” she gently replied.  “I’ve been looking for you for so long.”  She bent and kissed him.  “Thank you for finding me,” whispered Hank as his eyes closed again.  His hand dropped.  Picking it up in hers, she said, “Hank!  I’m not going to let you go again!” And then she felt his hand give hers a soft and almost imperceptible squeeze.

The Grackle Catcher

Soundtrack

Crazy

Patsy Cline

Home Is Where The Heart Is

Elvis Presley 

Light My Fire

The Doors 

The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face

Roberta Flack 

Misty

Johnny Mathis 

Colour My World

Chicago 

Dizzy

Tommy Roe

How Can You Mend A Broken Heart

Bee Gees 

Dying To Live

Edgar Winter 

Evangeline

Marie-Jo Therio 

Bye Bye Blackbird

Joe Cocker