I am never thankful for a few moments of silence.Strangely,that morning was one of consequence.
Morose and unseeing eyes rode up and down the black roads,staring,as if to wrangle answers to everyday sorrows out of the black tar.
Pause.Rewind.They wound back to a puddle on which floated a fleet of a most curious sort.
A pretty and tattered shoe with rhinestone edges headed this parade.
It had laced the delicate feet of the bar dancer last night,I whimsically imagined.She must have run away in the pitch of the night.Do not interrupt and ask me to fathom why she ran,not when what we do in most of our spare time is run away from realities.
Not keen to return to the mundane bus stop,I moved on to the next oddity in the puddle.
A tie stuffed into a cola can.
I could almost see the snot faced kid that had celebrated his afternoon after school with the school boyish gesture of discarding his tie.Not having found a suitable dispenser,the kid had decided to stuff the tie into the nearest object in sight.
Who said kids weren't resourceful?
Masquerading third in the puddle was a dirty scrap of paper.
A page out of a phone book,yet another slice of someone else's life.
10 digits repeated themselves over and over again;keys to a stranger's obsession,maybe that of a lovestruck lad's ,nursing his first heartbreak.
His lady had refused to answer his call,he'd vented his desperation and tossed the scrap away after overcoming it.
I laughed a little sadly at this boy's (?) plight,and then decided to make things better.After all,stories need happy endings,don't they?
Yes,our boy must have bumped into our running bar dancer wearing one pretty rhinestone shoe,and the two would have shared coffee and a good laugh over the craziness of their encounter.
Yes,our boy must have bumped into our running bar dancer wearing one pretty rhinestone shoe,and the two would have shared coffee and a good laugh over the craziness of their encounter.
Sighing wistfully,I shut the book that lay open on my lap.
Later,Mr.Maupassant.
I had other stories to know of.
My eyes left the queer masquerade on the eventful puddle.Once again,they moved up and down the black roads,only this time they weren't wrangling the tar for answers to everyday sorrows.
It was storytime,yes indeedy.
