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Dear Felicia,
About four days ago, I was in the grocery store and a girl, about six or seven, asked her mother, "How come there are watermelons now?" I was standing to their side in the deli line, and the mother replied, "Some people like them." It was the perfectly wrong answer of course. The girl was asking her mother: why are there watermelons, which we eat during the summertime, in the grocery store now during the wintertime. I had to resist the obvious urge to bend down a little and say to the little girl, "Well, the planet is like a big ball. And there are places on it right now that the sun is shining and it's summer. The reason we have watermelons here now, is that they fly them from places on the planet where it's summer right now to where it's winter." I didn't. I didn't know the two. It was one of those everyday social barriers that usually is better kept. Asking strangers in an elevator if they've all filed their taxes at the end of April is not good pubic etiquette. I did say to the mother, though, as I was handed my 2/3 pound of sliced mesquite turkey, "She asks good questions." "Which questions?" she asked me. "The one about the watermelons," I said. "Yes, she sure does," she said smiling.
A week ago, I was riding up the skilift. A father with a pretty hard-core macho-man accent was talking to his two little boys. It was just after lunch. The boys were about eight and five. "Let's shoot at three," the older boy said. "O.K," said the dad, "we'll shoot at three." The two boys and father continued talking about "shooting" at three or two but not four. In my parlance, they meant, let's try to go at about three o'clock, let's try to aim for then; I realized that these weren't little boys: they were little men. The father continued talking about getting back to base, and the space they needed to keep between the quads in the dark. He was talking about their riding ATV's, or All Terrain Vehicles, undoubtedly to some rustic log cabin in the hinterland. I sat quietly, the fourth person in the squished chair, with my bright blue jacket and crash helmet and skiis dangling. I realized that all the boys' metaphors were around hunting and killing. Real Hemingway. But, there was something far more important. These two little boys adored their father. They loved him. He was out with them. I wanted to pull the dad aside just after we were spilled out of the chair at the mountaintop, pull him lightly by his collar, like a lover would, and tell him in a whisper, "You know, your boys really love you."
These are a couple of anecdotes that I've tapped out just now in reply to your profile about liking to hear stories. You look and sound like a very warm and lovely person; I hope you write me back.
Egbert
# 64
