So, this morning we had:

A teenaged boy playing footsies with the truth, sleeping overnight somewhere else, and leaving me to wonder if he’d been mugged on the streets of Albi. He hadn’t.

Does this bring back memories of my years as den mother to four teenagers?  Memories, as in fond? No, it does not.

Then, a man who can’t stop playing a cross between a self-proclaimed orchestra conductor, political commissar and rule setter for us rag-tag humanists. Tomorrow night, he informs us, we are to analyze what went wrong in our behavior with the messed-up family, in order to apply his personal motto: “to learn in order to understand, to understand in order to act.” Perhaps we can print out the motto on red bunting and suspend it as a banner above our cowéd heads?

Which raises the next question: Am I willing to be graded like a puppy-in-toilet-training? When the man’s hectoring turns ludicrous, am I willing to get screeched down yet again with shouts of “Don’t interrupt me?”

No, I am not. (So, end of that exercise no later than tomorrow night).

As for the moment of zen on the marketplace. The one beginning with the man grabbing me by the arm and saying: “You must meet the boy pronto! It’s a matter of life and death!” Whose life and death, he didn’t specify straight off. But the story soon emerged of how the fourteen-year old’s latest stint involved the acquisition of a revolver,how the man had smashed the thing with a hammer – and threatened to apply said hammer to the boy’s head. This was followed by the sudden appearance of the jittery kid who considered my looking him in the eye a sign I was high on cocaine,  heroin, grass or a combo of these laced with LSD, and slithered off and away, giving me the woo-woo hand jive.

“He’s not a bad kid,” the foster papa said. “He’s been thrown out by every school, every home, every…You must, you must sit down with him, I know you can get through to him. If anyone can, you can, I’m sure of it. Please, please…”

I must? Really? No. Why must I serve as the boy’s brand new testing ground for outrageous and dangerous behavior?

What was it I wrote, once? “I was walking down the road, minding my own business…”

It is now one forty-five on this, a quiet little Sunday in this, the quiet little town in which I live. The photo illustrating this post was done by a local photographer by the name of Serge Simon. Many times, I’ve thought of it as an accurate representation of the fictional town in my series of unpublished novels (where things get a lot crazier than in this, the quiet little town in which I live).