About a month ago, I was in Richmond and Danielle, Chris and I decided to walk a friend home. On the way out I grabbed a hat-it was maybe 11 and I found one in the shape of a toucan. We walked six or seven blocks, then on the way back we saw a quantity of morons running down the street. Stupidly, we continued down the street straight into a few police cars; of course we get stopped.
"Nice hat."
"Thanks, officer."
It seems some master criminal had knocked over a mailbox, and naturally, three police cars were needed to quarantine the area, tending to the injured mailbox and insuring the safety of the other mailboxes. We had to go through the whole name/address rigamarole, probably because I had a tropical bird on my head. Then I forgot my birthday, which didn't help matters much, but we finally got out of there and regained our forward progress. Passing some ditch-ed houses, we saw a girl squatting by the side of the road, sobbing. A man was consoling her in the kind of way one consoles a misbehaving puppy-a calm, supremely controlled violence. One of us asked
"Is everything alright?"
"Does it look like everything's alright?" with the same scary dime-edged control in his voice.
He pauses. We keep walking with an uneasy lump in our stomachs. Then, almost as an afterthought:
"Nice hat."
3 comments:
is that how you spell rigamarole?
wear it to pit sometime!
I hope so, because if not a spelling teacher somewhere just died; and if I owned it, I would.
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