A Run Through the Corn

A Run Through the Corn

By Ken Ely

I’ve liked being without clothes ever since I was little. I think it’s a bit strange, then, that there were only two occasions I can remember when my brother and I played naked in the back yard, as many kids do. We lived on Air Force bases and most of the yards were not screened off, although looking back on it, I don’t see why that should have made much difference. And we didn’t spend much time naked inside the house, either, as our shared bedroom was always air conditioned for my brother’s asthma:  it was hard enough to play in there without a sweater, let alone without clothes. When I was older, after I got my own room, I could do silly things like practice my trombone naked but I had to be careful about who was in the house and what they were doing. Or, at least, I thought I did; most of the time no one would come into my room while I was practicing, anyway – but I could never be sure.

My high school senior year was ’65-’66. This was the tail-end of a rather long period in the western world when males commonly swam naked – just about anywhere, it seems – and females could not; but there were no uniform standards for the practice and it varied country-to-country and region-to-region. By the mid-60’s, the only places in America where men remained unshackled by bathing suits were some YMCA pools and scattered high school swimming classes. The last gasp for both of these male sanctuaries came in the early 70s.

I was never very good at school sports, the kind played with a ball, because I could never keep track of where the ball was or where it was supposed to go. But I was a good swimmer and I looked forward to at least a portion of my senior year’s physical education classes because swimming was to be part of the curriculum. The school had swim teams, of course, but I would never join one of them, even when invited. I should have.

In those says, PE classes were not co-ed. Today, I think most of them are still segregated by sex but you can find some that aren’t. Our high school had two pools rather than have the boys and girls share a common one. The boys’ pool was just off our locker room and had a big window in the upper half of the door, which was always locked. Only the boys’ swim teams and the senior boys’ PE classes were allowed to use it, so I never saw anyone in it, not being on a swim team. Finally, though, on a day when we were lined up in the gym waiting for our work-out instructions, our teacher announced that we were going to swim and told us to go back to the locker room, get out of our gym clothes, and form up on the long sides of the pool.

I don’t think any of us had given much thought to the fact that we might be asked to swim in nothing but our skins and it came as something of a surprise to all of us but we were used to showering together and dressing in the locker room, so we did as we were asked, chuckling at the novelty and calling raunchy taunts across the water while we waited along pool’s sides.

When the teacher came in, he mounted one of the diving boxes at the deep end and asked us to cease with the hallooing so he could tell us how the class would go.

Swimming would last for eight weeks (we had gym class twice a week, Tuesdays and Fridays). The next three periods, beginning with this one, would be devoted to sorting out our individual proficiencies in the water. We had two weeks to acquire bathing suits. He did not say that bathing suits were mandatory but since “if you want to wear one” was not included I assumed that at the end of two weeks, we would be expected to wear them. I also thought it funny that we were allotted two weeks to get them. I had two bathing suits and it would not take me two weeks find them. I brought one to the next class but didn’t wear it, just left it in my locker.

In fact, no one wore a suit for that next class. Maybe no one wanted to wimp-out and appear girlishly modest.

The following week, two or three suits were in the line-up but most of the boys still chose to swim naked. I say “chose” because I doubted that most or all of them did not have bathing suits and I rather thought that even the poorest fellow in the class could have acquired one overnight if he had wanted to. No, I think that most of us could have admitted to enjoying skinny dipping and would have acknowledged feeling camaraderie not experienced outside the pool. It was a definite social leveler.

I still wonder why the teacher gave us two weeks to acquire swimming suits. I did not know at the time that swimming sans vêtements was a norm for boys that was being phased out. Was it a school board mandate that our teacher did not agree with so he drug his feet? Or was he making a sociological point, showing us that many of our differences were artificial and that bonds of commonality might be forged where we had not expected?

The last class of that week, Friday, was the end of the two-week period allowed for getting suits. Or was it? I reasoned that the third week should actually have begun our ‘suited’ period. Most of the other boys turned out for Friday’s class in suits; five of us did not. Nothing was said by anybody when we lined up along the pool that day. But no one took off their suits to join the five of us, either.

It wasn’t until I quit college in my 3^rd year that I was among people that found being naked almost as natural as being in clothes. I went to live with an eccentric family of two young boys, two adult boys, two adult girls, and their parents. They were not nudists but neither were any of them bashful. This was good because we only had one bathroom.

The house had been built before bathrooms or toilets were indoor features and it looked to me as if the large upstairs bathroom had been installed post hoc in one of the several bedrooms. And it was a ‘bath’ room: it contained a tub, not a shower. And it might as well have had a revolving door, or no door at all, for whoever might be in the tub or on the pot, would have the company of everyone else coming and going. We all pooped, peed, bathed, and brushed teeth in the company of one or several other people, not necessarily of the same sex. Many family conferences ended up in that bathroom while essential bathroom business was conducted.

In the summer of ’68, we made a trip back to their family farm in the Midwest. The Suburban did not have air conditioning and it was hot; and we did not have money for motels so we camped. Well, more properly, we put our sleeping bags out at rest stops and moved off early in the morning before we could be run off by the wardens.  But on the third night, we stayed at a state park and it had a creek running through it. The further east we’d traveled the hotter it had become and we all were sticky and smelly so we decided we’d bathe in the creek at sunset, when we could still see what we were doing but be less likely to offend any of the other people staying in the park – of which there were not many as it was mid-week.

At dusk, all we grabbed soap and towels and headed for the creek bank where we stripped off and waded, soap bars in hand, into the creek. Fortunately, the bottom of the creek was lined with small stones, so it was relatively nice to walk in. And the water was cold but, if you held yourself down in it, you adjusted to the temperature and were able to wet down, lather up, and rinse off in relative comfort. The women washed their hair as they’d brought shampoo as well as soap, which the men borrowed to wash their hair, too. Damp-dry, we got back into our smelly clothes, went back to camp, and changed into clean ones.

That bath was totally refreshing, and not just because we were able to get cool and clean. I think it was because, for once, we were all bathing together. It was a family bath.

The next morning, one of the older brothers and I returned to the creek for a proper swim. Just down from where we’d bathed, the creek’s course narrowed, the channel deepened, and the current flowed more swiftly – but not dangerously so. Behind one big rock there was a pool that accommodated a shallow dive which would carry the swimmer out into the current toward some mild rapids. He and I got out of our kits and explored the pool and the current and then began making the swift loop from the rock to the rapids to back up the opposite bank to cross to the rock, over and over. One of the sisters came down to watch us and was at first a little alarmed by our plunging from the rock into the pool to be carried swiftly downstream toward the rapids but several repetitions convinced her we were quite safe. She stayed upon the bank to watch us, however, just to make certain neither of us got into trouble, until her father came down to call us up to leave.

The family farm was just as hot as the drive to it but the nights were comfortable, if not cool. I slept naked under a sheet – the first night in the farm house was the first time I had ever done so – and I have been sleeping that way ever since. The third night, as I got into bed, I resolved upon an early morning adventure: I would run naked through the corn.

Now, if a person were to run down the rows of corn, he would receive scratches from the edges of the leaves as his reward. But the harvester had been through the middle of the corn patch, for some reason, with trucks behind it, leaving a great corridor with tire prints in which the stubble had been crushed. Here was easy, scratch-free running. I had tentatively explored the corridor that day, had not been able to determine where it went, but had been inspired for my lark the next morning.

I awoke at dawn, dressed and carried my shoes to the kitchen, where I put them on and quietly and went out the back door.

The corridor in the corn was shaped like a T. From the farm yard behind the house, it ran north a short way and then went east and west. (I have always thought farmers began harvesting corn by going around the field from the outside working in, like lawn-mowing, or up and down from one side end to the other, until it is all gone. It seemed weird that a harvester would be driven into the corn in the middle of a field and then to the right and left, but what did I know?) I walked into the corridor until I got to the top of the T. There, I undressed, put my shoes back on, and speculated as to which way I should go. West was as good as east, so I went west.

The sun was faintly warm on my back and buttocks, the air faintly stirring. I could feel it move over the little hairs that covered my body. (I have read or heard the term ‘caress’ applied to air moving over those little hairs. That is exactly what it feels like: a gentle caress.) After walking a few yards, I began to feel as if I were coated with Teflon and smooth: there was no resistance to any movement I made. This generated a strange elation in me and I began to run – and running felt even better for it produced a wind over my whole body.

Much to my surprise, the corridor soon ended in a huge atrium where, apparently, they had turned the harvester and truck around! I stopped in the center of it to contemplate this wonder (for why would they do such an odd thing?) and to enjoy the tingly feeling of perspiration evaporating from my skin. Ah, well. Back the other way. This run was longer and, by the time I came to the end of it at the fence line and the road, I was properly sweating.

Across the road, I saw Mr Slavenhoek’s pig corral and decided to look in on the pigs. Looking back, I’m not sure what I was thinking because the corral was not very far off the road and a car could have come along at any moment; but one never did and I wandered along the rails looking at the pigs until I had cooled off.  After a bit, I crossed the road again to the corn field and walked happily back to my clothes, sorry that my lark had come to an end but vowing I would repeat the outing next morning.

I never went out in the corn again during the remainder of our stay there. Every night, I told myself that I would rise early and go but family events or projects or just plain fatigue always seemed to get in the way. We took a different route back to Washington, not staying near any creeks that afforded a communal bath. I lived through one more summer with that family and then moved on.

And what of today?

Well, the corn fields are a long way off, in distance and in time. But there is a lane in a secluded wood here, arched over by vine maples, ending in a shady atrium. I sometimes walk it now, soothed by patches of sun on my back and drifts of a breeze that caresses my body, and I feel again that I am covered in Teflon and am elated by the freedom.

-  *  -

Copyright © Kenneth E Ely February 2017

Rules for Dating

Rules for Dating

By Greg Morris

When I was in high school, I used to be terrified of my girlfriend’s father who, I believe, suspected me of wanting to place my hands on his daughter’s breasts. He would open the door and immediately affect a good-naturedly murderous expression, holding out a handshake that, when gripped, felt like it could squeeze carbon into diamonds. Now, years later, it is my turn to be the dad. Remembering how unfairly persecuted I felt when I would pick up my dates, I do my best to make my daughter’s suitors feel even worse. My motto: Wilt them in the living room and they stay wilted all night.

“So,” I call out jovially, “I see you have your nose pierced! Is that because you’re stupid or did you merely want to appear stupid?”

As a dad, I have some basic rules which I have carved into two stone tablets that I have on display in my living room:

Rule One: If you pull into my driveway and honk, you’d better be delivering a package because you’re sure as heck not picking anything up.

Rule Two: You do not touch my daughter in front of me. You may glance at her so long as you do not peer at anything below her neck. If you cannot keep your eyes or hands off my daughter’s body, I will remove them.

Rule Three: I am aware that it is considered fashionable for boys of your age to wear their trousers so loosely that they appear to be falling off their hips. Please don’t take this as an insult but you and all your friends are complete idiots. Still, I want to be fair and open-minded about this issue so I propose this compromise: You may come to the door with your underwear showing and your pants ten sizes too big and I will not object. However, to insure that your clothes do not, in fact, come off during the course of your date with my daughter, I will take my electric staple gun and fasten your trousers securely in place around your waist.

Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that, in today’s world, sex without utilizing a “barrier method” of some kind can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier and I will kill you.

Rule Five: In order for us to get to know each other, we should talk about sports, politics, and other issues of the day. Please do not do this. The only information I require from you is an indication of when you expect to have my daughter safely back at my house, and the only word I need from you on this subject is “early”.

Rule Six: I have no doubt you are a popular fellow with many opportunities to date other girls. This is fine with me as long as it is fine with my daughter. Otherwise, once you have gone out with my little girl, you will continue to date no one but her until she is finished with you. If you make her cry, I will make you cry.

Rule Seven: As you stand in my front hallway waiting for my daughter to appear, and more than an hour goes by, do not sigh and fidget. If you want to be on time for the movie, you should not be dating. My daughter is putting on her make-up, a process which can take longer than painting the Golden Gate Bridge. Instead of standing there, why don’t you do something useful like changing the oil in my car?

Rule Eight: The following places are not appropriate for a date with my daughter: Places where there are beds, sofas, or anything softer than a wooden stool. Places where there are no parents, policemen, or nuns within eyesight. Places where there is darkness. Places where there is dancing, holding hands, or happiness. Places where the ambient temperature is warm enough to induce my daughter to wear shorts, tank tops, midriff T-shirts, or anything other than overalls, a sweater, and a goose-down parka zipped up to her Adam’s apple. Movies with a strong romantic or sexual theme are to be avoided; movies which feature chainsaws are okay. Hockey games are okay.

My daughter claims it embarrasses her to come downstairs and find me attempting to get her date to recite these eight simple rules from memory. I’d be embarrassed too – there are only eight of them, for crying out loud!

And for the record, I did not suggest to one of these cretins that I’d have these rules tattooed on his arm if he couldn’t remember them. (I checked into it and the cost is prohibitive.) I merely told him that I thought writing the rules on his arm with a ball-point might be inadequate – ink washes off – and that my wood-burning set was probably a better alternative.

One time, when my wife caught me having one of my daughter’s would-be suitors practice pulling into the driveway, get out of the car, and go up to knock on the front door (he had violated rule number one so I figured he needed to run through the drill a few dozen times), she asked me why I was being so hard on the boy.

“Don’t you remember being that age?” she challenged.

“Of course I remember. Why do you think I came up with the eight simple rules?” 

-  *  -

Implosion at Day's End

Implosion at Day’s End

By Ken Ely

“You associate with some of Blaine’s more dysfunctional citizens, councilor,” the police sergeant laughed.

“To be sure, Jon,” I agreed, “but, then, you’ve been called to my house, too.” (The son of one of the other police officers had come to our house on an evening when my wife and I were out and had slapped our eldest daughter – ill-advised horse-play made more ill-advised by beer.)

Jon laid his hand on my shoulder.

“Well, Doc, my house was pretty dysfunctional not long ago, too.”

As we parted company, my mind resiled to the previous day. Not that the cops were in it; it was simply a day that had run along like any other until, near its end, it had toppled in upon itself. Imploded, if you will.

The topple had begun about four o’clock with a call from a young man I had not heard from in almost twelve years. I had taken care of him and his brother when they were young. He called collect from the county jail to request I bail him out.

“Have you asked your dad or your mother to bail you out?”

“Yes,” he admitted, “and neither of them will do it.”

“Well, that’s a pretty good indication that I shouldn’t either,” I told him.

He began to cry.

“But I don’t like it in jail.”

“You’re not supposed to like it in jail, Brandon. That’s the whole idea,” I replied, but I assure him I would discuss his situation with the Blaine police in the morning.

Next, I completed and exam on a patient that did not feel he needed an exam.

“I’ve had this same problem off and on for years, Doc. Just crack my neck.”

This I was not about to do.

“Maybe you think it’s the same problem, but this time you’ve got all the clinical signs of spinal nerve root compression. I will treat you but by other means than ‘cracking’ your neck.”

“You’re not going to crack my neck?” he asked, dumbfounded.

“No, I’m not.”

“Well, then, this visit’s a waste of my time,” he declared.

“You’re the one that’s wasting it,” I told him.

He saw himself out.

“Rachel is on line one,” my receptionist informed me as the man departed.

“Aunt Flow is here,” my wife’s voice said into my ear.

“Ah,” I temporized, wondering why she would call to tell me this. I could always tell when it was that time of the month by her disposition.

“Not me,” she laughed. “I mean Alyssa. She’s a woman at last. She asked me to bring her some supplies.”

“Where is she?” I asked.

“At soccer practice.”

So, the baby of the family had begun her monthlies and had called her mother from the locker room at school – just where the defining cycle had begun for my wife some thirty years earlier.

“Well, give her my condolences.”

I had just hung up the phone when my receptionist announced another call from my wife.

“Jaci just phoned me in tears,” she said. “She’s wrecked her car, so Tyler and I are going to Lynden.”

(Jaci is Alyssa’s older sister.)

“Tyler?” I answered. “Why isn’t he working?”

(Tyler is our second son, older than Jaci and Alyssa.)

“I don’t think he has a job anymore, but we’ll talk later. You’ll have to pick Alyssa up after soccer. At the Ken Waters gym.”

“What about her supplies?”

“I’ll drop them off to her on our way to Lynden. Bye.”

“Bye.”

I put the phone down and stared at it.

Jaci, actually my step-daughter, was living in Lynden with her father and attending Lynden Christian School. He bought her a cute little SUV as one part of his attempt to make living with him worth all the grief involved in living with him. Now the car, in all probability, was not so cute and the grief involved in living with him would become more involved.

Tyler, at 22, had just moved back home for the second time ‘to get his life together’. Apparently, divesting himself of his job was part of that process.

Going out to the receptionist’s desk, I glanced over her shoulder at the appointment book and muttered, “There must be some sort of pollen in the air.”

The phone rang again. It was the patient I had just seen. He had talked to his employer who would not accept his worker’s comp claim.

I took the call in my private office.

“It’s not up to an employer to accept or deny a worker’s comp claim,” I assure him. “That’s the State of Washington’s decision.”

“Well, I’ll just pay cash,” he argued.

“Not until the state denies the claim,” I said and rung off, not wishing to go very deeply into the obligations and liabilities involved in work-related injuries over the phone.

Immediately, another call – from my wife, on her cell. She and Tyler were now in Lynden with Jaci. Jaci had slid around a corner, her car fetching up all-standing on the gas meter at Maple Leaf Auto Body. She had not been speeding – she assured Rachel of that in round-eyed terms. The pavement was wet.

I made the observation that she’d been lucky on two counts: 1) she hadn’t blown herself up and 2) she was right where she needed to be to get her car repaired.

Rachel then informed me that Alyssa now had her supplies but had called back and asked if we could go out to dinner to celebrate her pivotal occasion.

Dutifully, at the appointed time, I parked in front of the Ken Waters gym. After waiting a considerable time with no Alyssa in evidence, I decided to call Rachel.

“Oh, she won’t be coming out of the gym, exactly,” my wife clarified. “She’ll come round the back corner of it. Have you seen any of her teammates?”

I rattled off the names of some girls I’d seen. None were on Alyssa’s team, just every other team. But while I was rattling, I caught a glimpse of Alyssa’s pony tail bobbing through the field of my rear view mirror.

“Ah! There she goes! Bye!” I rang off and bounded out of the car.

“Oi! Alyssa! Where are you going?”

“To the Performing Arts Center, to wait for Mom!”

“The Performing Arts Center? She said to pick you up at Ken Waters! Well, never mind. Mom’s in Lynden. You need to ride home with me.”

Sliding into the right-hand seat, Alyssa asked why Mom was in Lynden.

I told her in brief and diverted to why she was going to wait for Mom at the Performing Arts Center rather than at the Ken Waters.

Alyssa shrugged and said that Mom always picked her up at the Performing Arts Center.

“Why did she tell me to pick you up at the gym, then?”

“I have no clue. How did Jaci’s wreck happen? Did somebody crash into her?”

“No. She went round a corner and slid on wet pavement.”

I was still focused on the Performing Arts Center.

“It’s a good thing I saw you in my mirror. If you’d gone on by, I’d have been sitting here like a hound waiting for his owner and you’d have been standing over there like Evangeline under the oak tree.”

Alyssa let this observation pass and said flatly, “Jaci was prob’ly going too fast. I told her the other day that she drove too fast and didn’t watch where she was going.”

“Indeed?” I replied, anticipating she might elaborate.

Instead, she asked if some of her friends could come with us to the restaurant to celebrate – female friends, of course. Just three of them, in fact.

I replied, rather plaintively, that I had anticipated that this was to be a limited celebration: herself, Mom, me, and maybe the jobless Tyler. I added, a little sourly, that I did not relish spending my evening meal with a gaggle of her girlfriend, probably all on the same cycle as her.

Alyssa’s very large eyes became larger.

“You and Ty would be coming?”

I must have looked hurt. (I was.)

She backpedaled immediately, “Well, you can, of course. I didn’t mean you couldn’t. I just didn’t think you’d want to since it’s going to be a ‘red’ party.”

I confirmed that, if it was going to be a sorority event rather than a family dinner, I would happily sit it out, especially as I had a city council meeting to go to and would have to rush the party, anyway.

As a consolation, Alyssa offered to do a family thing the following evening.

I suggested that a two-night celebration of her onset might be a little over the top.

When we arrived at the house, a group of young people were milling about on the lawn. They were not the menstrual celebration; they were Young Life leaders.

“Did you get my message?” the leader in charge asked, stepping out of his car.

I had not.

He had called some forty-five minutes ago asking to use the downstairs of our house for a Young Life meeting. The message was on the answering machine.

No one, of course, had been at home to listen to it. I suggested that, to ask to use the basement of our house for a meeting of thirty to forty teens, he should probably call a week in advance.

He accepted this as a good plan.

I informed him that I had a city council meeting to attend and that none of the rest of the family would be home this particular evening (unless the fallow Tyler chose to opt out of the ovular dinner).

The leader pledged upon his sacred honor that he would be fully responsible for our house and the conduct of his evangelees.

“Just so,” I concurred, wondering if his notion of timely communication defined his concept of responsibility for personal property.

Alyssa and I entered the house by the side door. She went directly to her room but I was promptly summed to the front door by three girls attired in various red garments. As soon as the door was opened, they trooped gaily in and marched back to Alyssa’s room.

Then the phone rang. It was Rachel.

“Please go and comfort Alyssa,” she said.

I could hear peals of laughter coming down the hall from Alyssa’s room.

“Why does she need comfort?” I asked.

“She just called me in tears. She’s afraid she’s hurt your feelings – about the celebration dinner.”

“Well, she’s not crying now. In fact, her friends are here and the red party has already begun. Judging by the hilarity, I can’t forecast a particularly sedate rite of passage.”

When Rachel and Tyler returned, I was gratified by his assurance that he would remain at home on ‘anchor watch’ while I governed the city and his mother took the lunar girls away.

I heated some left-overs and wolfed them down, driven more by and urge to escape the cacophony that filled the house than hunger or any urgency of time.

As I made my departure through the laundry room, the Young Life leader intercepted me, asking, “Do you have a bucket we could use?”

“What sort of bucket?”

“One that will hold a chicken.”

“A live chicken or a dead one?”

“A dead one.”

I provided the bucket and retreated to the comparative sanity of city politics, not wishing to contemplate what sort of evangelism might occur below decks with a dead chicken while the disengaged Tyler stood watch above hatches, entranced by the TV.

My return home after council was, I congratulated myself, mercifully late. Gratifyingly, I found some subduction in the activity in the house. Only quiet conversation and shuffling emanated up the basement stairs. Alyssa was alone, in her room, doing her homework. Rachel was reading in our bedroom.

The party had been a resounding success, she informed me when I entered it. The staff at the Mexican Restaurant had sung Happy Birthday to her.

“Why did they sing that?” I asked.

“Because they didn’t have a song for a girl’s first period.”

“No. I daresay they might not. Probably should, though.”

I heard someone in the kitchen followed by a voice booming down the hall ahead of his body, “Excuse me, has anyone seen my car keys?”

Rachel’s eyes met mine with an unspoken, “Must be a trait common to all males.”

“Have you looked in the furniture downstairs?” I called back. “Everything gets lost between the cushions. You have to dig deep.”

I was an accomplished cushion sounder and accompanied the leader downstairs. As we passed the open laundry room door to the garage, I looked out the open garage door to the street. The leader’s car, jumping up and down to the thud of a battery-powered boom box, was loaded with writhing passengers waiting to be taken home.

Arriving in the basement, I found several other leaders and some teens milling around in that aimless, vacuous, fruitless way they do when they look for something they have lost.

“What were you doing the last moment you remember having your keys?” I ask the key-loser.

“You were opening the chicken wrapper with them,” one of the millers-around answered for him, and he picked up the bucket to gaze blankly at its contents.

To my relief, the chicken was a commercially prepared roaster and not some beheaded bird with the feathers still on. I was also glad the chicken had been brought to my attention since it was still in the basement: abandoned by the kids and unknown by me, the house might have become redolent of rotten meat in a matter of time.  

The leader grabbed the bucket from his friend and plunged his hand into the carcass.

“Here they are! Inside the chicken!” he joyfully proclaimed and held the keys, coruscating with chicken slime in the incandescent light, aloft for verification.

“Eureka,” I said sotto voce, and suggested, “Perhaps you’ll want to rinse them off – before the little globs of fat dry.”

The leader darted off to the bathroom to rinse his keys, dripping a trail as he went.

I now had the bucket and handed it back to the lad who had first picked it up.

“Take the chicken with you when you go. I’ll get you a plastic bag so I can keep my bucket.”

As the leader’s car bounced away, I pulled the garage door down and returned to the bosom of my family. My wife met me as I came through the kitchen.

“Alyssa needs help with her homework. It’s the big Civil War paper.”

“It’s 10:15 and Alyssa needs to go to sleep. And if she doesn’t, I do.”

I switched off the kitchen light for emphasis.

“I’ll write her teacher a note in the morning explaining that the Civil War has been delayed due to Alyssa receiving her red badge of courage. It’s a point arguable under the Women’s Reform Movement, which helped to bring the war on. I’m sure the point will carry.”

Alyssa could not be convinced the point would carry but she did agree to go to sleep.

The indigent Tyler, however, was not disposed to going to sleep. He was disposed to watching TV. In fact, he could see no arguable reason for going to sleep at such an immature hour since he had no job to get up for. My point that he was going to get up early and go find a job was not well received. However, it did carry.

As I stretched out under the covers beside Rachel, she put her book down and said, “Want to hear some good news?”

I allowed that it might be a laudable way to end an absurd evening.

“The gas company is going to be responsible for Jaci’s accident.”

“Because the gas meter struck her car?”

“No. Because the stanchions that are supposed to protect the meter – well, protect the traffic, if it goes up on the sidewalk – were only set into the cement three inches. They are supposed to be set a couple of feet down into the cement. So the gas company is liable.”

“Fortunate,” I admitted, “for Jaci. But it must be some throwback to Roman law because it’s very near bizarre.”

I rolled over and switched off my lamp.

The next morning I conversed on the curbstone with Jon, the police sergeant, about the jailed Brandon. As I suspected, there was a great deal of background to his story and jail was the most appropriate place for him.

In the office, the patients arrived on time and were not argumentative.

Tyler, inching toward mutatis mutandis, was out applying for jobs and had enrolled for a second time in a class to get his GED.

Alyssa, besides fretting over the Civil War, was preparing for a school field trip to California. How the paper was to be achieved, I could not imagine. Well, I could, if I wrote if for her, but I was not going to do that. (It became a community effort accomplished by her girlfriends.)

Jaci had called first thing to complain that her dad had grounded her from her only-slightly-crumpled car because she had gotten eight tardy notices and was now consigned to riding embarrassingly around Lynden on her bicycle.

Pausing between patients, I looked out the window at the sunshine and offered a brief Deus Misereatur. After all, the day was still young.

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Copyright © February 2017 Kenneth E Ely