No quiet in the cemetery
No calm
Cars drive by, sirens sound
No calm
Birds chirp and twitter
No calm
Families visit, talk, weep
No calm
Life goes ever and ever on
No calm

If you can read this, that means you’re not logged in, hint hint.

If you’re not registered yet, what the heck are you waiting for?

You’ve probably heard by now… yes, it’s that time of the year. And you may know that the Nobel Committee has already awarded prizes in physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, peace, economics. But I’ll bet you didn’t know that this year’s prize for blogging had yet to be given.

It is ironic indeed that I have listened to stories on NPR of other recipients being awoken at odd hours, only to hear the jingle jingle of my own phone at 4:30, this very morning.

“Hello?” I probably said, trying to wake myself up. “Hello?”

“Is this a Mister Yoo-uhh… a Mister Whuh-huh… is this Whiskey?” came a foreign accent, quickly stirring my curiosity.

“Well, yes… this is Uisce,” I said. “But how did you…”

“My name is Olfnfn Svnrgnfn,” I think he said. It was early, as I mentioned.

I don’t think I got the spelling right of the caller’s name. But none of that would matter. He was from the Nobel Committee, he told me. He was sending a car for me and I would be flown immediately to Stockholm to receive my award.

“Yeah, sure,” I believe was my clever response. “Genuine, is that you? Cut the crap and let me get back to sleep.”

What a kidder, I thought. And then I did the math. Wait a minute, I realized. It was 2:30 in the morning in Colorado. Maybe this guy was for real!

Sure enough, the dogs were barking up a storm as soon as the limousine pulled up our long dirt driveway. The ringing of the doorbell at such an early hour caused an even greater stir among the household.

And I was off, and it was quite a blur. Thank goodness I’d left my passport in my toiletries bag the way I always do. “Just in case,” I always say, and wouldn’t you know there was finally a case where it came in so handy!

We pulled up at the Panda Express drive-through for some lo mein on a stick, my favorite on-the-go breakfast, and I knew I’d need two big steaming cups of green tea for this trip. One of them was burning a hole in my stomach when we pulled up at the Lufthansa doors at Logan.

“Good luck, sir,” said the driver. I jumped out and headed into the terminal.

But what the… Flash bulbs were going off all around me and now I know why people are always covering up their faces when they walk by a camera. Damn, those lights are bright! A microphone was thrust into my face and its owner could be none other than channel 4’s roving reporter — judging by the big “4″ stenciled onto the microphone’s wind cover.

“How does it feel to get the call?” the reporter asked. “How does it feel to be going to Stockholm?”

“Well do I have to take my shoes off this time?” I answered. It was all I could think of. No wonder everybody seems like such a moron on TV. They’ve got people rifling questions at them.

“No questions right now, please,” came a voice from my right. But when I looked there, my dog was just sitting there, smiling and wagging her tail.”

“Puppy, how did you…”

“Flight 53829, now departing for…”

Damn, that was my flight! I rushed for the gate, the gang of reporters trailing behind me, my dog still sitting in the terminal. Who was going to take her home, I wondered. How the heck did she…

“Your shoes, sir…”

Yeah, yeah. I knew it. Didn’t I… aw hell, never mind.

The flight was long. But I guess it beats the hell out of swimming all the way there, so close to the Arctic Circle.

Arriving in Stockholm, getting into the car, rushing to the Concert Hall, it was all a blur, and I was low on caffeine, I was thinking. How could I get my hands on a… The next thing I remember was being led onto the stage. The lights were unbearably hot. If only I could take off this… hey, where did this jacket come from?

I had been introduced and given my trophy and now I had to make a speech. What would I say? I just thanked them and told them to be sure to visit my blogroll. There was thunderous applause from the audience and I kissed my statue. The Nobel Committee Chairman came to lead me off of the stage and I gave him a big hug. We strode off the stage arm in arm.

And then there was a tap on my shoulder.

“Whiskey,” I heard.

“Thank you, no interviews right now,” I think I said.

“Whiskey, it’s time to get up.” I knew I recognized that voice. It was Wifey’s!

“Oh, OK,” I told her, and looked around me. I was holding my alarm clock in my hands and hugging my pillow close to me.

“Must have been some dream,” she said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “Some dream.”

When you spend as much time as I do at the fair in an animal barn, you quickly lose all contact with anything happening on the outside. Sure, there are the streams of visitors, coming in to see the animals, and then they disappear into the darkness beyond those giant sliding doors.

It was the bright lights that shone into the building — that was the first indication that anything out-of-the-ordinary was happening. A man stood in the doorway of the barn, his back to us inside. The halo of light surrounding the man made it difficult to see, at first, that he was wired — an earpiece and hand-held microphone tethered him to the equipment that stood before him.

The mystery man motioned with his free hand to the inside of the barn, but it wasn’t until he turned and ventured inside that we learned who he was or what he was saying.

“…and it is believed that he is in this barn,” the man’s smooth voice announced to an unseen audience. It was a field reporter for one of the local television stations. When he wasn’t standing outside in the wind-driven snow of a blizzard, he was reporting on everything from fashion design to high school football.

“Oh no, not again,” said a club member standing not far from me. She was referring, I had to assume, to the major drama of the year prior. A prisoner was being transported between facilities when the van that was carrying him overturned on I-95. He ran from the scene and ended up at the fair. And he had actually been in our barn. And he had stolen a lasagna that one of the members had prepared for the fair workers. He was caught in some nearby woods, still licking the dinner from his hands.

“His name is You-uh… Wh-uh…” the reporter continued. “Whiskey,” he then said, repeating the word that came through the wire connected to his ear. “Whiskey the Blogger is rumored to be in this very barn.”

His crew followed him into the barn and he held up his microphone for effect. “Whiskey, are you here?” he called to us inside.

“He’s gone insane,” the same club member said, shaking her head.

I was turning red, I could tell, and it had to be obvious. “This commotion can’t be good for the animals,” I said, and I headed for the back of the barn.

Sneaking out was easy with everybody’s attention focused on the excitement, the manhunt. I went around to the front to see hundreds of people standing, gawking, trying to see what was happening inside.

“What’s going on?” I asked a man eating a slice of pizza.

“They’re looking for some guy,” he told me. “…a blogger, I think — whatever that is. Whiskey something.”

“Did you say ‘Whiskey’?” came a voice nearby, a woman with a small child in a stroller. “Is he here? I read in his blog that he’d be here at the fair, and I put two and two together, that he had to be here in this barn.”

“So did Channel 4,” I said.

“He’s going to be on the news?” the woman asked.

“Guess so,” the man replied.

“Have you been inside to see the animals, ma’am?” I asked her, an motioned for her to follow me.

“Uhhh, no…” she said, and realized that I’d meant for her to follow me around the barn.

“Do you know who he is?” she asked me. “Is he here?”

“Yes,” I said. “He’s here.”

The human occupants of the barn were still following the continuing coverage of the manhunt. Now the reporter was interviewing people, asking if they knew of Whiskey’s whereabouts.

The critter occupants of the barn were oblivious, sitting in their cages. I took one out and crouched down, showing it to the boy in the stroller.

“Ooh,” he said, petting its fur. “Soft.”

“So is he here?” his mother asked. “Is Uisce in the barn?”

“Ummm,” was all I managed to say.

“Are you…”

I gave her an ix-nay on the Iskey-whay kind of look and she just smiled.

Her son was still petting the animal and she handed her camera to one of the other club members. “Would you mind?” she asked.

She crouched down next to the stroller and put her hand on the critter. “He is soft,” she agreed as the camera flashed and the picture was captured.

Eventually the news crew left the barn. Apparently their source was wrong about this Whiskey-the-blogger fellow being there. So there won’t be any film at eleven. But if you see a picture of man in a yellow smock and a woman in a blue sweater and a boy in the middle with a big grin and a bunny… well… ix-nay on the Iskey-whay, if you know what I mean.

Last year during National Novel Writing Month, I actually wrote a novel. No, you can’t read it. It sucks.

But don’t worry, the next one will be better. But it’s not going to happen this year.

As you might imagine it takes quite a lot of time, if not effort, to put 50,000 words on paper… or in my case, into my laptop. And this year I just don’t have the time.

I do have a really great idea for another novel, and this time I’ll aim for a more respectable word count of 90K-100K. But I’ve got to keep myself from ruining it by trying to jam it into a NaNoWriMo.

I’m just glad the idea for last year’s novel sucked, so it was really no great loss.

Don’t get me wrong. NaNoWriMo is a really great opportunity to force yourself to write that novel you’ve got kicking around inside your head, because if you don’t just do it, you never will. And maybe you’ll even love the process so much that you’ll want to do it for real some day. And once you’ve got one under your belt, I figure it can’t be that hard to pick up the pen and start the second one, right?

But not this year, not for me. If you see me discussing any kind of inkling or possibility that I might participate this year, please just slap my little nose with a rolled up newspaper and tell me, “NO!”

Green grass
Green walls
Red clay
Red white and blue flutters
Blue yells, play ball
White pants no more
White ball
Black bat
Blue sky
Green wall
Green grass

Over the past weeks and months, a number of readers have asked me why I don’t eat chocolate. Do I have some kind of allergy? Did I eat too much of it as a child? It’s a bit more complicated than that. And while this story is hard to believe, it’s as true as anything else I’ve ever made up.

I blame myself, and I always have. The student loans had piled up over the years, as they ordinarily do, but I wasn’t doing anything about them. Four aimless years were turning into five, but at least I had finally decided what to do with my life. My summers had been spent — wasted, really — wandering. One year it was backpacking around California. Another and the one after that it was Europe, exploring castles. These trips were meant to be educational, and I suppose they were, but they weren’t cheap, and were financed with credit cards that had been all too easy for a jobless student to obtain.

So with no money, and nothing saved up from summer jobs that never were, and with mountains of debt, I started my “adult life” as a mere continuation of my ill-spent, over-spent youth.

Writing was my passion, and it had to be some kind of calling. I had written volumes during those trips, and if faeries had followed me around from place to place, they might have gathered up the scraps of paper I had left from one corner of the world to the next, and they might have even published them. They were left behind for a reason, though — they were just plain bad. I’d been told as much in California by a woman in a pickup truck who had driven me to the bus station. She wrote for the local newspaper, she told me, and could she read what I’d written, she asked. And told me it was just immature scribblings, and I had a lot to learn. And I suppose she was right. She was kind enough to buy me a bus ticket to Phoenix. I was working my way back east.

That was a few years ago, and so many credit hours ago, and so very many miles ago. If my writing had been immature because I had been immature, surely I had grown up since then. After graduation, I thought about going back to California. The pickup truck lady — her name was Debbie — she was getting paid to write and there had to be something to that. It could lead to something more interesting, couldn’t it?

Everything I owned fit nearly in a medium sized backpack. Even the credit card statements and student loan bills that were beginning to arrive by mail fit neatly into the front pocket. They could be ignored for the moment, couldn’t they? All I needed was a job, and I was about to find one.

Hitchhiking across the U.S.A. would have to be considered one of the most interesting and romantic things a young man could do, if it weren’t one of the stupidest. I suppose it all depends on who picks you up. It’s a roll of the dice, and it really is a huge gamble you take with your life, getting into a stranger’s car. And how can I complain about stumbling onto the first “grown up” job I was ever going to have.

They don’t train assassins. The notion that there are government agencies and secret organizations training young men and women to be killers, it’s just the stuff of bad novels and action movies. It starts with a nice looking middle aged man in a Buick, and did I need a ride? And if I’m hitching a ride, I must be in some kind of financial mess, he guesses correctly, and could I use a job? The craziest part about it was that he told me right up front what he needed and how it was supposed to happen. He seemed to honest about it that I couldn’t help feeling I could do this “job” and turn my life around. Oh yes, ten thousand dollars would have done that quite nicely.

She had been cheating on him, he told me. She was the love of his life, he told me, but things had changed and she had been sneaking around behind his back. She had broken his heart, he told me. He wept as he told me the story. They had grown children. They went to church, and he was a respected leader in the community. A divorce would take away his dignity, he felt. It would destroy everything he felt he still had left, he told me. I couldn’t breathe as he told me all of this. He seemed to desperate, and he was confiding in me, a complete stranger. It had to be this way, of course. You don’t share a murder plot with anyone but a complete stranger.

My heart was pounding, and I accepted his offer. I was almost afraid not to, I knew so much about this man. But I didn’t, I realized. His car had Ohio license plates and he sounded like he was from the Midwest, but he picked me up in Connecticut. There was something that didn’t made any sense about this. I began to fear for my own life, but something told me that I had crossed a line and could not turn back. The plan was very simple. I would receive ten thousand dollars up front, along with maps and pictures. The man had just arrived in Hartford for a “business trip” that would last another nine days. I was to fly to Columbus and take care of business. Whatever expenses would be covered by the extra thousand dollars he hastily placed in my hand. He never wanted to see me again and wanted to settle everything now, he told me.

But what if… what if… There were so many questions and concerns and why did this man trust me at all? And what was going to happen to me? I was already wondering if he was planning to have me killed as well, and started feeling sick, physically ill. We pulled over to the side of the road and I opened up the car door and threw up on the ground.

He trusted me, because I reminded him of himself, he told me. He remembered hitchhiking coast to coast on a dare, the summer after high school graduation. He remembered the thrill of the road, the people he met, and when he got to the part where he met his wife, he just began sobbing. They finished the journey together and formed this bond that would last for– forever, he thought.

Would I do this, he asked me one more time. I told him I would. He simply told me to do my best. I started to laugh when he pulled more money from a pocket inside his jacket. Hadn’t he given me enough? Another fifty would get me to the airport, he told me. He was going to drop me off right here and he really was on a business trip, he insisted, and he really did have a meeting he needed to attend.

And that was that. I found myself a few minutes later riding in a taxicab to the airport with eleven thousand dollars in my pocket and a picture of a stranger’s wife. No problem. The cab driver was good enough to pull over to the side of the road so I could open up the door and throw up one more time.

The rest of that day was just a blur. I arrived in Ohio and rented a car, which was a little bit nerve-racking with a credit card on the verge of cancellation for being over the limit and behind in payments. The man’s house was just a half hour’s drive from the airport, and was easy enough to find. And then I started wondering if this really was the man’s house, if this really was the man’s wife I had been sent to murder.

Murder, the word hung in my head with a nauseating brilliance that made me throw up again. I was going to kill another human being, wasn’t I? I had taken the man’s money and I had promised. It wasn’t going to happen today, though. I checked into a nice, clean motel room a few blocks away from the man’s own house and spent the night. My nerves would be calm in the morning, I told myself. They certainly couldn’t be any more frayed, not ever.

I went for a long walk the next morning and got the lay of the land. The man had a nice house, I saw. I walked past the man’s house, and it was such a surreal experience. I was done throwing up, though. His lawn and the neat row of flowers planted by the sidewalk were safe from being vomited on by the boy who was about to destroy the peaceful calm of this neighborhood. And I was. But how? There had been no training, there was no instruction manual for what I was about to do. I walked back to my motel room and thought for a while. I surprised myself at how sinister my plan was, but in a way it was actually going to feel right.

It’s amazing what you can find when you look through the yellow pages. Want to be a delivery boy? Simply look for a costume shop in any city and a uniform can be had for a very reasonable price. But what to deliver. The man had told me that his wife loved chocolates. He had told me a story about their first week traveling together and how she had been craving chocolate. There was a certain brand from California, and when she joined his journey to the west coast she became obsessed with the idea of having this certain kind of chocolate. He had been beaming as he told the story, a smile so big I thought his face would break, such a contrast from the tears he cried and the rage he shared when his story moved forward more than twenty years into the future.

I was fortunate to learn that I would not have to fly to San Francisco and buy a box of Ghirardelli chocolates, that they could be found in one of Columbus’s many gourmet food shops. And that second easy part of the plot was done. Next I needed something poisonous enough to turn delicious candies into deadly weapons. I chose arsenic, and I had a pretty good idea about where to get some.

The Ohio State University is a fine academic institution, but like any large college, there are students who just want to party. And if you want to party with the chemistry students on a Friday night, all you need to do is attend class with them on Friday morning. It was Wednesday morning and I wasn’t willing to wait for the weekend parties to meet the student body. I was bold and daring and I really wasn’t, but I think I put on a pretty good show. I found the chemistry department and hung out in a hallway outside one of the classrooms where a lecture was taking place. I was actually pretty shocked at how easily I obtained a deadly poisonous substance. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised at a student willing to take a couple hundred dollars in exchange for something the University was just going to buy more of.

The hardest part of the puzzle was still before me, and I’m thinking of becoming a surgeon with the skills I have found I possess at cutting open chocolates and replacing nuts with poisons. Or could I become a plastic surgeon with the skill it takes with a heated Exacto knife to gently replace the bottom of a candy so seamlessly you would never know it had been touched? No, those weren’t even the hardest tasks I faced. I spent three hours wrapping that damn box in cellophane. The longest three hours of my life, it seemed. I wanted to be able to finish the job that evening, but I was running out of time. Besides, there was still more preparation required.

It occurred to me that I really had no interest in being caught, so while my disguise was clever enough, it was not quite complete. I found makeup that would give my face a wrinkled appearance. I found that white paint and powder in just the right combination gave my hair a salt and pepper look that would convince anyone. The moustache was just the right color, too, when I was finished with it. This delivery man was a good thirty years older than myself, and that was just perfect.

It was Thursday afternoon when my plan went into action. I filled my car with Mylar balloons to give the impression that more deliveries were to follow. Several of them would come with me to the door, along with the package of chocolates. There was a yellow sports car parked in the driveway and another inside the garage. Was this going to be a two-fer, I wondered. I couldn’t believe I was doing this, but doing it I was. I walked right up to the door and rang the doorbell.

I heard both a man’s voice and a woman’s inside while I waited. It was a very long minute before a woman in a bathrobe answered the door. Was this Cindy Baker, I asked, and it was. Her husband had sent these balloons, I told her, and a box of chocolates. He was sorry he had to be away, but he wished he could brighten her every day. The poem was as corny as could be, but it didn’t need to be Shakespeare, after all. That was so sweet, she told me. She reached into the pocket of her robe and as she did it fell open just slightly. There was nothing at all underneath and I glanced quickly away from the body she had just been sharing with another man. I gave her a minute to cover herself back up and when I looked back I saw that she hadn’t. She stood there in that doorway with her robe just hanging open. I glanced away again and she laughed. She was offering me a tip but I was embarrassed and hurried from the door back to the car. She couldn’t have made my job easier, I realized.

I could hear both of them laughing as I drove away. I was anxious to get out of my disguise, which I would find some way of burning completely. The years were washed out of my hair and off of my face. I was young again and a completely different person when I walked back down the street an hour later. The car was still in the driveway, and there was silence inside. I had no way of knowing what I had done, how well, how thoroughly. I went back to my motel room and ate some take-out dinner I had bought. I stayed in the room and watched the television that entire day.

The next morning I ventured back out and went for my long walk through that quiet neighborhood. And still quiet, it was. And I studied that house as I walked by that one last time. How interesting that the sports car was still in the driveway. And even more interesting that two newspapers were lying on the front stoop. I wondered what tomorrow’s newspaper might contain.

I knew there had to be a saying about lions and gazelles, and here is where I found it. And here is how it goes:

“Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning a lion wakes up. It knows that it must outrun the slowest gazelle or it will starve to death. It doesn’t matter whether you are a lion or a gazelle, when the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

The gazelles all wake up in the morning and there’s quite a lot of sibling rivalry. They’re sitting around the breakfast table and mom and dad gazelle say, “you kids are going to have to run really fast today,” and the kids all say, “we know.” and the smart alecky big brother adds, “I just have to run faster than my little sister.” But I really don’t know if that’s true. When I’m out hunting for bears or wolverines or lobsters, I’m not after the slowest one, I’m looking for the one that’s going to cook up the best and, well, the little girl needs to grow up and have babies for us to eat. I know there is some kind of lesson here, and I’ll bet it’s an important one.

But that’s not really my point, because I’m not a hunter myself. Not unless you consider chasing pigs around the yard hunting, and that’s a story I have not told here, and I probably won’t. Just imagine a pig… oh, about 2 1/2 months old… being chased around the yard because pigs are vile creatures, they really are. And you can’t kill it because you’ve paid 65 dollars for it and you’ve only spent a couple weeks just beginning to fatten it up. No, you have to catch it because when the police get calls about pigs in the woods, and then they have to come and “talk” to you about it, that’s just too embarassing for anyone to endure. Thankfully it never came to that.

But really, my point is that March begins tomorrow. It will come in like a lion and it will go out like a lamb. I’m not a big fan of lamb, and whether I have mentioned that before or not, I really am not sure. I love Indian food, and I’m sure you all know that. I only like lamb if it’s part of an Indian dish, and I don’t know if that represents some kind of racist, lambist issues in me. I’ll only eat you if you are prepared in such-and-such a way, slowly cooked with this spice and that spice… So the lamb who is clever enough not to be prepared in such a way… well the days have ended for that lamb, and… how can I put this? I guess if I were standing in that lamb’s hooves, I’d want to be eaten and really, truly enjoyed. Oh sure, there is nothing wrong with having your leg placed on a rotisserie and spun round and round and round. No, not for me. Dice me up and spice me up and call me stew.

Yes, March will go out like a lamb. In like a lion. It’s cold back home, so they tell me. I watched the Today show briefly yesterday, but long enough to see that it’s about nine degrees back home. We sat having dinner… must have been Sunday night, and my sister had prepared the most incredible pulled pork. And she announces that we’ve had eight inches of snow back home. “We” she says, as if we all have gotten that much. Well she lives near the coast and I live an hour and a half from there, on a big hill with its own weather system. They said we were getting three inches, and who am I to doubt the metereological skills our nation has to offer? The point is that Wifey jumped up from the table, took my phone, and called her parents, who live near us. We never did get ahold of someone to plow us out if it snowed, and if our animal helper people can’t get in and take care of the animals, well, there is nothing out there I’m planning on eating, not unless the hens get to laying, and I do love fresh eggs. So Wifey confirmed that we only got three inches, not enough to bother anybody, really.

In like a lion, out like a lamb, and that’s just the month of March, the month of St. Patrick’s Day and basketball tournaments, and whatnot. The longest month of the year, I think, because we’re waiting. We’re waiting for spring. Spring and fresh air that it doesn’t hurt to breathe. Spring and goat kids and milk and eggs. Spring and green grass and outdoor baseball.

I try not to get too hung up on the coming season, though. Never wish away the one I’ve got, because that would be foolish. Each day comes in like a gazelle, fast and afraid. Wish away a week or a month and suddenly the years fly by and we have no idea where they went. The gazelles are being chased — the fast ones, the slow ones, the happy ones, the sad ones. Each day comes in like a gazelle to enjoy, cherish, treasure, and if we’re lucky, the lion isn’t quite so hungry all the time.

Because if we’re really, really lucky, each and every day goes out like a gazelle.

It was red. If I remember anything about that car, I remember that. It first caught my eye on a summer day during my eighteenth year.

That was a foolish summer, indeed, and there are plenty of stories I could make up and tell you, but this one is special because it contains so many firsts.

First girlfriend, first beer, first Porsche, first time getting caught… but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

I might have lied before. It first caught Wendy’s eye, and I was just a fool in love. What pleasures might await me at the end of a joy ride in a shiny red sports car, I could only imagine, but the gleam in her eyes matched the gleam in the chrome, and I knew I was going to take a chance.

The beer lubricated my young brain just enough to allow such a stupid idea to take root, while providing some insight into the task before me. I’d never popped an ignition before, but I’d seen it on TV. How hard could it be, Mr Schlitz suggested.

She watched as I carefully followed all of the steps as I recalled them from auto theft school. She had a look about her that told me I was doing something right. But the proof of this pudding would be in the…

Vroooom, tha-tha-tha-tha-vroom! And all of a sudden there squeals of delight, a kiss on the cheek, a tug on my arm, and the smell of leather. We were off in a cloud of dust I only imagined to shield our getaway from any onlookers there might have been, but thankfully were not.

City streets weren’t going to be much fun, so I headed straight for the highway, where we could really give the car a workout. And besides, that road led toward the beach.

The miles flew by, and so did we. She held onto my arm, as I was smart enough to keep both hands on the wheel. Her smile was worth all of this, I thought — she was really enjoying the ride.

How we made the hour’s drive to the coast in half that time is still a mystery to me, as is the fact that there were no state troopers anywhere along the way. The planets were all lined up, weren’t they?

I parked our chariot and shut off the engine, then ran around to the passenger door, to escort my lady the rest of the way. I grabbed her hand and we ran through the darkness as if a dozen officers were in pursuit. But there was nobody there, and nothing at all but stars in the sky above us and seagulls on the deserted beach before us.

Our feet splashed in the water as we ran laughing through the sand. After a minute we caught our breath, and then we caught each other.

“That was really cool,” she told me.

I wanted to reply but Wendy’s lips got in the way and the kiss lasted longer than my memory of whatever I’d intended to say. And while I might kiss and tell, the rest you’ll have to imagine for yourself. Once she began taking her clothes off, I had no choice but to get naked myself. Suffice to say that I was properly rewarded for my earlier crime, a lesson I would carry with me all the years that followed.

Our next lesson was that people like to walk the beach at night in spite of the presence of frolicking youths. That woman and her dog certainly got an eyeful, and that was enough embarrassment to last me a lifetime.

NOTE: Any resemblance to another red Porsche post is strictly coincidental.

I don’t know if there will be a Silly Saturday post today.

What was I thinking, anyway? I was walking down the street, munching on a granola bar. It was one of those kind that’s sweet and salty at the same time. That can’t be very good for you, can it?

So I was really enjoying my granola bar, wouldn’t you? I was thinking, mmMmm, this is such a great granola bar, and just all these yummy thoughts…

When all of a sudden a basketball rolls right out onto the sidewalk!

Now if you’re like me, you’re going to take immediate notice of things like basketballs rolling right out onto the sidewalk. And lucky that I did, or I might have tripped over it! And would I have held onto my granola bar while at the same time falling helplessly to the ground? I should think not.

Well then I hear those three words, you know those three words… the ones you kind of expect to hear after a basketball rolls toward you. “Hey, little help?” called a small voice.

I looked all around for the source of the words. You might be imagining that I should be looking at basketball player height for a mouth from which said words had emanated. But no, and perhaps I wasn’t clear that this was a small voice, a very small voice.

So I was looking at small basketball player height for a mouth from which said words might have emanated. A child, perhaps. No, there was none to be found.

Remember the granola bar and all of its yummy goodness? Well suddenly then, so did I. I remembered that I was still holding a piece in my hand and I quickly ate it. I hoped that its caloric sustenance might provide me clearer thinking and more effective searching.

MmmMMmmm I thought as I polished off my tasty granola bar.

“Hey, little help?” came that voice.

There it was again, I thought. Although now that I think further about it, I believe that I thought it in the present tense even though as I tell the story in the past tense it seems more logical for my mind to be working in past tense. So long as it doesn’t work backwards, I think this will be OK.

Maybe it was the granola bar, and maybe it was divine intervention, but all of a sudden, I saw about twenty feet away a gopher. No, not a Minnesota Golden Gopher, I’m talking about a real live gopher, member of the geomyidae family of mammals. He was dressed smartly in a shiny purple basketball uniform, clearly a member of a team.

“Oh, little gopher,” I said to him, “did you lose this?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied. “So, ummm… little help PLEASE?”

A very well mannered gopher, thought I, and I reached down to pick up the ball.

I held the ball in my hands and thought back to my childhood days on the playground. I wasn’t a very good player, and so I never spent much time with the ball in my hands. And then I thought back to my fantasy adulthood, playing for the Lakers — the real ones from Minneapolis, not that west coast team that would lose six championship series to the Boston Celtics in the sixties. Vern passed me the ball, and I faked the shot and passed it off to George… and he passed it back to me, and…

I looked at the ball in my hands. I still had it, I could still dream of the big leagues.

I rolled the ball in the direction of the gopher. “Thanks, man,” he said as he scurried away.

“You’re welcome,” I called after him, but I don’t think he heard me. “Game on, little gopher!”

It’s been so long since I’ve thought of that little girl, but when Stephanie showed me that picture, the years all rolled back and the tears all flowed forth.

Update: Stephanie even has a poll where you can vote on which of the Spooky Girl stories you liked best! Wow!!