The first indication that anything was amiss was a Monday morning phone call from Marge Hildebrandt.  She’s a retired schoolteacher lives over on the next block.  I’d tell you that Marge has too much time on her hands and not enough to do, but then, my wife might say the very same things about me.  I don’t know why Marge called me; it’s not like I’m with the police or anything.  I was captain of the Neighborhood Watch quite a few years back, but I’ve since given that up, letting someone younger and more ambitious take the lead.  Donald something holds that job now, the Spanish guy in that brick tudor who rarely steps outside his front door.  He is not a good fit for the job, but that’s another story.  Why I got this particular call, I don’t know.  My guess is that Marge’s memory is failing (at least as quickly as my own), a fact that has been apparent for some time.  She probably thinks that I am still the Block Captain.

It seems that someone had murdered her snowman.  It wasn’t Marge’s snowman, not per se: her grandchildren had built the snowman in Marge’s front yard, sometime over the past weekend.  Technically the snowman belonged to the kids.

Summer had it coming, standing there all smug with that arrogant look that said “come and get me, boys.”  You could tell, just by looking, that everything would be easy in her world: you could see it on her full red lips and her too-short shorts and the tight top that wrapped around her brief little frame and left nothing to the imagination.  Summer was youth and hope and promise and fresh starts, that’s what she was, and even if he knew that what she was saying was nothing but a pack of lies, knew that the things she was whispering in his ear were, without a doubt, far too good to be true, well he still had to go along for the ride because how could a person turn something like that down?  It was simple enough to fall for her lines, especially for one getting up there in

I was chatting with a friend over coffee, heavy subjects like what should be done about urban blight and how the job market isn’t very good for guys our age and whether the Tigers have any real shot at a pennant this year.  We were dining at a Goat’s Horn Restaurant.  It’s a good place to go for a late breakfast if you’re a man our age: practically every booth contains at least one retiree, if not multiple geezers (I think there’s a minimum required by local zoning ordinance), and so my buddy and I get to feel like youngsters in their midst.  We were on something like our fourth cup of coffee, the plates cleared and long gone when the topic du jour meandered around to the religious affiliations of our youth.  

“We used to be Presbyterian, until one summer my father and I converted over to The Church of the New Car,” my friend proudly proclaims.  I’ve heard a lot of interesting stuff over the years, but this was a new one.  Church of the Rising Trout, sure (my brother and I found that the presence of God was most obvious on blue ribbon trout streams), but I’d never heard a word about the Church of the New Car. This was a sect I needed to explore.  I encouraged him to keep rolling with his story.  Did you get a new Buick with

Every day I push my shopping cart down Jefferson Avenue, collecting cans and bottles and anything else I can find of value.  “Can Man,” most people call me, if they admit they see me at all, and I’ll take it;  it’s a lot better than some of the other names I’ve been called.  Most people just look away, or look down at their shoes.  They pretend like they don’t see me, but a person knows when he’s been seen.  A few take pity, flip me some change or even a buck or two.  One time a guy handed me a ten dollar bill, and it was the best day I’d had in a long, long while.  Those are the exceptions, though.  The avoiders are in the majority.

“Can Man,” they say it like it’s some kind of insult.  I don’t look at it like that.  At least I’m out here doing something, trying to make a living, or at least a tiny portion of a living.  So what if I’m scrounging for other people’s discards?  I’ve got my regular route.  I cover the same ground everyday, and I know every trash can, bush and shrub along the way.  I’m doing a public service, too,

He was her husband’s friend, not her friend, and she certainly didn’t need him hanging around the house like some stray dog just wandered in from God knows where.  He was out back, her husband, tinkering with the car or some fool thing in the yard, and here this friend “Jack,” that’s what they called him but she wasn’t so sure that was even his real name, Jack comes waltzing in through the kitchen like he owns the place and asking for a glass of water.  

She’d never liked Jack, not one damn bit.  If you asked her why, she could give you a list of reasons as long as her arm, but in the end, they all boiled down to one thing:  “Jack” was nothing but short for “trouble.”  It didn’t 

Someone asked what I'd been reading recently, and it was hard to provide a succinct answer.  I'd recently been bequeathed a stash of crime stories spanning various eras, encompassing a myriad of different styles.  The most interesting of the bunch was "Gun, with Occasional Music,' which despite my usual distaste for dystopia and futurism (okay, I'm actually pretty fond of dystopia, wreckage and ruin), was an extremely interesting and fetching tale.  Once you get past the talking kangaroo and the babyheads, it reads  like a  good Bogart movie.   In my quest to see if the author was a one-hit-wonder, I picked up a collection of his short stories, "Men and  Cartoons."  This, like any collection of shorts, is a bit more hit-and-miss, but well worth the read.  

My box of books also included a few by Cornell Woolrich, who cranked out well over 100 novels in the 1930's and 1940's.  The current one in hand is "The Black Curtain," although I  recently read "The Bride Wore Black"  (see a pattern here?).  Woolrich's style is incredibly stilted, like you're working your way through a screenplay instead