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May 23, 2007 There by the orange trees, they walked, and the old man was crooked. He was not crooked in his morality but he was crooked in his posture. He had always had poor posture, and looked like he was about to fall over. You wanted to stand beside him, and straighten him out, and sometimes people tried to. It was 30 degrees Celsius and they were in Hollywood, Florida. It was a street lined with old bungalows, built decades before, but that stood well still. “Always buy a brick house,” said the old and crooked man. He didn’t say much, but he said that once and a while. “Nothing will trouble a brick house,” he would say after, as if to drive his argument home. He knew what he knew, and that was it. For his money, it was a brick house. A brick house in a world full of sinners, in a world where you wanted to avoid “trouble,” because there seemed like there could be trouble everywhere. They continued to walk like that. The boy was about ten, and the man then was about eighty. The boy wore shorts and a t-shirt, and the crooked man wore a full suit. It was a wool-like suit too, nothing light. The path to salvation must smile on suffering. Sometimes the crooked man would undo the top button of his shirt to loosen the collar a bit, but he kept his tie on. There by the orange trees, they continued to walk. The boy thought of pools, and the beach, and the whitecaps of the waves. The boy thought of shells a bit, and of the diving board, and the malls too. The boy thought of fancy and advanced remote control cars, sometimes called Frogs, that were not the typical remote control cars or trucks from Radio Shack, but that were highly advanced, with things like suspension systems and interesting shocks, tires that actually took air. These vehicles came from hobby shops, and were a different game altogether. Once the boy had seen a huge arena converted to a track for such vehicles, and a hundred little Chinese men and boys there, driving them around, and changing the parts, repairing the trucks. Even in Pompano, where the boy came from, two teenagers would appear across the way, with these Frogs, driving them up humps, and they would fly through the air… The old man walked but then stopped. He pulled a plastic bag from his pocket. He started to pick up oranges that had fallen to the ground. They were from a tree on someone’s property, but the old and crooked man said, “I will take these oranges. They have plenty of oranges. This is not troubling anyone in any way. These oranges are good oranges…” And every so often, that is what he would do- pull out his bag, and take a few oranges. Sometimes he picked one or two off a tree. They made the way back to the house, a little bungalow, that had Papaya trees n the back, and the ants crawled up and down forever. In the front there was a large statue of the Virgin Mary with a black snake under her feet. The statue, or part of its supporting structure, was always infested with hornets’ nests. That’s the rub for you though. That’s the world. The world as it was once anyway, for a moment, along a street by the orange trees. ------------ Email Brian Michael Barbeito: Brian1750@Hotmail.com Comment on this article here! ------------ All articles are EXCLUSIVE to Useless-Knowledge.com and are not allowed to be posted on other websites. ARTICLE THIEVES WILL BE PROSECUTED! |
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