There's a mentally handicapped guy named Carl, who lives in a small village along the state highway about 10 miles east of here. He's in his late 30s or early 40s and his parents moved him into a house of his own next door to their place after they woke up one night and discovered him standing over them with a butcher knife in his hand.
My wife used to work in a dentist's office where this guy was a patient, so she knows a bit about him and was able to fill me in on his background and capacity for strangeness.
I became aware of him because his house is on one of my alternate routes to my doctor's office and various other destinations. He keeps a weathered old wooden Adirondack lawn chair in front of his house and spends a lot of his waking hours sitting in it and watching the traffic go by. For the past several years, I've gotten into the habit of looking for him. If I see him, I honk and wave and he waves back. I imagine there must be hundreds of other regular passers-by who have the same honk-and-wave relationship with Carl.
So, I guess I shouldn't have been surprised this morning when I saw him standing at the roadside in 7-degree (make that about -14 Celsius for you Canadians) cold. He wore an unzipped parka with the hood over his head and his shirted chest exposed and had what I assume was a cup of coffee in his ungloved left hand while he waved with a bare right hand.
Cold enough for you, Carl?
1 comment:
After 3+ decades of public service, I cherished the folks like Carl. They are genuinely happy to see you (and vice versa) with no ulterior motives.
And much less of a problem than stuffed shirts!
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