It’s been a surreal weekend. Today has been a good example. It’s not bad stuff, just odd.
Pancakes this morning. The guy, Moto, who brings a bunch of volunteers with him said, “Hey, Dotty, want to see the back of my van?”
“Yeah, I’ve heard that one before,” and I grinned because I really had no idea where he was going with this stuff.
What it was, you see, was that his group had just picked up bread that Ithaca Bakery couldn’t sell. They bring it to Loaves and Fishes and stuff. When they pick it up, they put it in the back of the van. Ooooh. Now I get it.
I’ve only heard the van line in movies. It was most impressive to hear it on Sunday morning from the guy who’s supervising people who need to do community service. “Hey, baby, want to see the back of my van? Upholstered ceiling, shag rug, the mattress fits in there real nice. Bet you would, too.”
Yeah!
I went shopping for a little while. I knew it was time to go when they played Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror”. Mike’s asking him to change his ways. I’m asking him to change the channel.
On the way home, I saw a car stopped and a woman just beginning to walk away from the car. She was by the airport and she would have to walk a mile or two or three to get to the gas station that she wanted to visit. I picked her up and took her there.
Would my grandmother be horrified? She says, “Dotty, don’t pick up any hitch hikers. It’s not safe. You’ll get killed.” She’s also the woman who says things like, “I can’t believe it! The woman was hit by a car on a busy road because no one would stop and help her!” She looked like a mom. She was a mom. Her son is eighteen. She went to work today because she missed work Friday and wanted to make it up. She usually fills up the tank on Friday, but she didn’t because of the car trouble which is why she didn’t get to work. She has the gold card version of AAA, but she’d been waiting there for an hour and forty minutes and she was getting annoyed and afraid they wouldn’t come. She’s pretty sure she ran out of gas and that it wasn’t the car.
I’m not dead, so I guess I did the right thing.
I like hearing people tell stories. The lady in the car didn’t get far enough for me to get anything coherent out of it except that she prefers to fill her car by the day of the week rather than the letter on the gauge. But stories make me feel amused and as if I’m saving something valuable to use later. This morning a guy came in and started talking about historical things and I said, “Oh! BrilliantEditor is interested in that stuff and it’s local stuff, right? What’s your name, if he might want to talk to you?” I got his name and number and a hell of a lot of info. He’s a blacksmith, a machinist, a woodworker, an industrial designer, he designed a firewall for the Concorde (I didn’t mention the unpleasantness.), he’s made stuff for NASA, and now he does security at Emerson. He wants to get promoted, but the company passes him over because he’s seventy-seven.
On the way out the door he said something like this, I’m only sure of the last two lines, obviously:
Blah blah through life
Babble babble,
Keep your eye on the donut,
And never on the hole.
I did my best to say, “Right on! That’s great!”
I turned to Moto and said, “Did he just ask me to see the back of his van?”
Moto said, “I was going to ask you the same thing.”
Posted by dotty at September 12, 2004 06:19 PM