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Mar. 30, 2005 This has nothing to do with Terri Schiavo, liberals or conservatives, Democrats or Republicans, or Michael Jackson. But it is a true story with some implication for many areas of life. A few years ago my wife's sister and her husband were visiting us. They had grown up near Cleveland, Ohio. By coincidence, one of my wife's old high school friends called from Toronto, Canada, where she had been living. This lady on the phone has one of those remarkable memories which can recall every single thing that ever happened but she has a mind which cannot organize any of it into any coherent pattern allowing an efficient life. She tends to ramble from topic to topic, and though occasional facts are interesting, the gestalt becomes immensely soporific after a minute or two. On this occasion, my wife's ear had become sore from over an hour of rambling conversaion, and so she handed me the phone. Trying to interrupt and make some contribution to the conversation, I mentioned that my wife had relatives visiting and that they no longer lived in Cleveland, but in Florida. The mention of Cleveland triggered another long and rambling stream of consciousness which went as follows: "You know Nancy and I grew up in Fairview Park, and the strangest thing happened on our graduation night from high school. I was out with my boyfriend and he had a black convertible and I had been drinking more than I was used to and we were parked in the lot back of Kostanderos's Greek Restaurant. I was leaning over the passenger side door vomiting when a wrecker truck pulled into the parking lot and a guy got out carrying a rifle and he climbed way up on the back of the wrecker and he shot the air conditioner on the top of Kostanderos's Restaurant and then he just climbed down and got into the cab of the wrecker and drove off." Now you have to know my brother-in-law, who is a bit of a crazy man, driving 215mph blown alcohol dragsters at age 60 and otherwise not acting his age, and the story of aman shooting an air conditioner struck a chord. I turned to him and said, "Ron, did you ever shoot an air conditioner off a Greek restaurant with a rifle 30 years ago?" "Hell no!" he said. "Only an idiot would shoot a rifle inside city limits. I shot it with a 12 gauge shotgun loaded with buckshot. But how in hell did you know that? Nobody saw me do it." "Well," I said, "am I not known as the man who knows almost everything? I have spies everywhere, and somebody did see you. Otherwise, how would I know about it?" Ron just stared at me and shook his head. Later, after I finaly got off the phone, he told me the whole story, which was that the bartender of the Greek restaurant was a friend of his, that the air conditioner had become quite noisy and inefficient, and that it needed to fail completely before the owner of the restaurant would agree to replace it. It was only a short step in my brother-in-law's mind from that little problem to the quick and easy solution: Just shoot the air conditioner dead! Now just what are the odds that one will be sitting in Virginia, on the telephone to Toronto, Canada, and discover that one's brother-in-law killed an air conditioner 30 years ago in a town hundreds of miles away in Ohio? The morals of the story, if there are any: 1) No matter what you do, somebody may see you. 2) That somebody may have a long, long memory. 3) If you are determined to kill an air conditioner, take Ron's advice and use a shotgun inside city limits. It's safer. ------------ About the author Brooks A. Mick: 63-yr-old physician, still practicing medicine but retired from the US Army. Write just for the fun of it, but working on novel in the vein of Tom Clancy's politico-military genre. Email: brooks15@cox.net ------------ 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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