The Daughters of Eve

One evening as my sister and I finished mowing E.M. Bower’s lawn, Mr. Bower talked to Mom for several minutes—sharing his discount book catalogs and describing his antipathy for computers.

When Dad drove up and joined the conversation, it struck me Mom might be the biggest difference between Dad and Mr. Bower.

If it weren’t for Mom, Dad’s overalls wouldn’t have patches, and he wouldn’t have eaten nearly as well. Perhaps he wouldn’t care about the distance between the gladiolas in the garden, and who knows, he might even have become an alien enthusiast.

While I enjoy a quiet apartment, doing dishes when they bother me, reading Heretics on public park benches, and buying hamburgers for homeless guys on Sunday nights, it appears guys who do this too long end up resembling the sad old dogs who wear paths just inside the fence and bark absently at the moon.

If you’ve ever lived in a smallish town, you’ve seen the type. Paperboys say his house smells funny and wonder that his living room only has one chair in it; his lawn looks ragged immediately after it’s been mowed; and the neighbors wave and then chuckle under their breath as he returns from the post office with another box from Amazon.com.

The men who occasionally talk to him don’t quite comprehend the connection between the weather last week and what might be hidden inside the pyramids, but charitable folks say, “He’s not stupid; he’s just…different.”

When Shakespeare’s Benedick said, “the world must be peopled,” perhaps he could just as accurately have said something about it keeping its sanity.

In any case, when I catch myself talking longer than I intended or watching my coworkers’ eyes glaze over as I draw obscure connections between a literary passage and a political issue, I wonder how long it will be before folks quit inviting me to dinner.