People Tell Me Things

Today a sweet middle-aged guy came over to give me an estimate for sanding and resealing my deck. Within fifteen minutes of chatting in my backyard this man had disclosed to me the following:

He had a two pound dog that he loved very much and it died in 1999 and the ashes of the beloved dog are buried with his wife whom he accidentally ran over with his truck as the result of a catastrophic brake failure on the trailer he was towing and he was devastated and was tempted to jump off a roof at a job but he had god who helped him through but his adopted daughters don’t talk to him because they think he ran over their mother on purpose but he’s now married to a lovely Chinese woman and they are very happy and go to China twice a year and have been to very remote places there including “Women’s World” where the young folk have walking dates during which they hold hands and if the girl likes the boy she scratches his hand three times and if the boy likes her back he does the same…and the boys are thrown out of their houses at 16 years of age and are given a piece of bread and a knife to use when visiting a girl at night—the knife is to open the sliding gate to the yard and the bread is for the dog and then he must navigate over a cactus which is always planted under the girl’s window.

Seriously. Within fifteen minutes he shared all this. And there is more. Like how the village folk asked if he could sing a song and he said yes and sang Strangers in the Night and then the girls lifted him up in the air over their heads and several girls scratched his hand but he didn’t scratch back so they started pinching him when he was still up in the air.

I am not kidding. This is a true story. And this happens to me ALL THE TIME—at the bank, in book stores, at bus stops, in restaurants and in bars.

People tell me things.