Daylight Savings and Loan

don't end don't end don't end don't end don't end...

Person:  I'd like to borrow some daylight, please.

Banker:  Splendid.  How much did you have in mind?

Person:  Six months?

Banker:  I'm sorry, we don't provide daylight loans over - or under - one hour in duration.

Person:  Um...

Banker:  So?

Person:  So what?

Banker:  So, how much daylight would you like to borrow?

Person:  Really?

Banker:  

Person:  Geez - an hour?  I'd like to borrow one hour of daylight, please.

Banker:  Excellent.  And how do you intend to secure this loan?

Person:  If you're asking for collateral, I have... I don't know - my soul, I guess.  But you're not the devil, so never mind.

Banker:  Well, you're right about that.  I'm certainly not the devil.  However, I do have bosses, and in lieu of collateral, we will require at least a business model.

Person:  For daylight?

Banker:  Yes.

Person:  For an hour of daylight?

Banker:  Yes.

Person:  An hour of daylight that I am only borrowing - that I will have to pay back?

Banker:  Precisely.  What will you do with this hour?

Person:  I want to have a picnic--

Banker:  Let me just stop you right there.  We don't give loans for picnics.

Person:  I... I need it.

Banker:  Listen- I'm really busy, here...

Person:  I just need to survive the winter, okay?  This hour of daylight will help me do that.  If I'm paying it back, what difference does it make what I do with it?

Banker:  Young lady, this is a business.  If you don't have viable business plan, and you don't have a ready means to repay the loan, I'm going to have to ask you to leave.

Person:  Okay, okay.  I just want another hour with my family.  I don't know how I'll pay it back, exactly, but I know I'll figure it out.  I'm not here for a handout.  I'll find a way to repay it.

Banker:  I'm listening.

Person:  We were in that accident on the interstate - the drunk driver going the wrong way - it was all over the news.

Banker:  I heard about that.  You're the lone survivor, then?

Person:   Yes.  And if your bosses could just lend me this one hour, I swear I will find a way to repay it.  I'll work two hours in a soup kitchen.  I'll pick up trash by the highway.  I'll help out at the animal shelter - or the hospital, or hospice, or whatever.  I just want to say goodbye.  It happened so fast...

Banker:  I sympathize, but I don't think we can help you.

Person:  Just name your terms, sir.  I'll find a way.  I'll do whatever you say.  It means that much to me to just be with them for another sunny sixty minutes.  I'll repay double - I don't care.  I'll give you a two-hour--

Banker:  Excuse me!  We don't just give away hours of daylight, here.  Tell you what - come back next spring, and we'll talk.  Good day.

Person:  But--

Banker:  I said good day!

Silence Echoes: The World According To Giant Bat Wings Roland

...Drive!

I opened my notebook and cleared my throat.  "Giant Bat Wings Roland," I began.

She immediately raised a hand.  "Stop."

"Already?"

"Yes.  If I can guess in three tries how Roland got that stupid name, can we skip this, and watch 'Family Guy?'"  She didn't so much want to watch the show; she wanted to fall asleep to it.

I acquiesced.  

She looked at the ceiling for a moment.  "He had some kind of deformity that his fellow hoboes said looked like giant bat wings?"

"Nope," I said.

"Okay - hold on.  I know whatever it is has to be weird.  He wore a pair of fake giant bat wings?"

I made a show of checking my notes.  "No.  Strike two..."

"Ugh.  Alright, um... Oh!  I know - he actually had wings - and not just deformed arms or something."

"Seriously?  No.  Geez.  He just always carried a pair of ordinary bat's wings with him - wings that he described as 'giant,' although they were not.  At all."

She scowled at me.  "Of course.  How could I not have guessed.  It's so obvious."

"Roland was orphaned when he was ten, and-"

"Oh, here we go again," she groaned.  "What manner of freaky death befell his poor parents?"

"I have no idea how they died.  Not much is known about him at all.  I just have some quotes, translated from the hobo signs he left scrawled on track-side sheds and telegraph poles between Pittsburgh and Altoona in the 1930s."

"Those squiggly lines and triangles and stick figures?  How much story can be conveyed that way?" she asked.

"More than you might think.  Here's what I have, in no particular order...

My brother Walt is an engineer.  Hasn't spoken to me since we were small boys.  But he always slows his train when he sees me walking, so I can hop aboard and ride a while.

I know his signature pull on the whistle cord, and can hear him for miles.

One night, I walked the Pennsylvania just east of Horseshoe Curve, and I heard the silence, and I knew.

Silence echoes, though only hoboes can hear it.  The sound of that whistle never came.  The silence echoed off the hills, down to where I walked.  It was the end of Walt.  The next morning, I came upon the mangled steel. 

No one talks to hoboes, around a wreck.  Supposed to be bad luck.  They didn't need to say it.  I said a prayer and kept on walking.

The world was mine, anyway.  Walt knew nothing of my freedom."   

She shook her head, as if trying to dislodge water from her ears, then kissed me, and rolled over.  "Nice one, sweetie.  Good night."


Shockingly, this post was prompted by my friends at Studio 30 Plus, using "here we go again," from this fine blog post, and "weird," from this one.  Stop by either of these bloggy places, and you won't be disappointed.



 

Pantless, Sockless, Shoeless Buster Bareass - On Loss

In my quest to tell the stories of John Hodgman's 700 HOBOES, I have often struggled to find any useful information at all, beyond a name.  Many of these people are nothing more than ghosts.  Interviews of actual hoboes have been helpful, but short of that rare face-to-face meeting, I have found that the best window into the forgotten lives of America's legions of train-riding wanderers is found in the letters a few of them left behind.  

The following letter was found in 1949 in the woods near the Louisville and Nashville tracks, twenty-two miles southwest of Mobile, Alabama.  It was in a glass bottle, clutched in the skeletal remains of a long-dead man - presumably its author - next to a shallow grave marked only with a number of small rocks arranged on the ground in the shape of a cross.  Local authorities had the remains exhumed, and they were able to determine that it was a woman, estimated to have died at least fifteen years prior, probably in her mid-twenties and eight-to-ten weeks pregnant when she perished.  Nearly all of her bones had been broken.

My Dearest Eleanor,

I will try to be brief. I know you hate when I ramble.  I hope I needn't remind you that I view our time together as nothing short of a miracle, but in case you forgot, there it is.  I never believed in soul mates before you stumbled so drunk and pretty into my campfire.  Enough said, I'm sure.

It has been five years, but the only difference between how I feel now and how I felt when it happened is that now, I'm older and more tired.  They said time would heal me.  It hasn't.  They said I could take comfort in knowing that you and the baby are at peace.  I cannot.  And Lord knows I have tried.  They even said I would love again, the fools.  I have not.  I will not.  I cannot.  I love you, and that is all.

I tried to convince myself that it wasn't my fault, that if you couldn't hear the train over the storm, there was no way you could have heard my voice.  I don't know.  I said nothing.  I just stood there, paralyzed and stupid in my disbelief of my own eyes, and it was over.  You were gone.  Our life, ended in a horrible blink.  No, I will not forgive myself this loss.  We knew plenty of losses before this one - my pants and shoes, my watch, your scarves and the photograph of the two of us with the sideshow madam in Cincinnati.  Even the fingers I lost to frostbite were nothing.  I am empty, I am dead, I am lost.

I still wake at night and speak to you, as if you are beside me.  I dream of our baby, always a girl, and she looks just like you.  Every day, I tell you I'm sorry, over and over.  I have returned here twice a year - on your birthday, and on our anniversary, to bring you flowers that I paid for myself. 

And now I think I've cried enough, trying to reach you, and to be where you are.  There was frost all the way down near Pascagoula last night, and it feels just as cold, tonight.  I'll sit with you, sweet Eleanor, and drink all this hobo wine, and I'll pass out, and freeze right to death, right to you.  And we will be happy - you, me and the baby.  I hope you haven't met someone new, where you are.  That would be awkward.  Anyway, if that's the case, I'll have only myself to blame, for not doing this sooner.

I'm sure when they find me, they'll say, "Oh, this poor bum - he had nothing of his own," but I know better.  I'm not a bum.  I am a hobo, and I had everything.  I had you.

With all of me,
Buster

P.S. I didn't freeze to death, and I have a splitting headache.  I'll try again tonight.

This post was written in response to another Studio Thirty Plus writing prompt.  This time, the phrase (He had nothing of his own) comes from one of my own posts, last week's little ditty about Packrat Red And His Cart o' Sad Crap.