i like to go for walks. where we live now, the only place to go for a walk, really, is just to walk around the block. not such a bad thing, i suppose.
one day last fall i went for a walk around the block. it was a nice, sunny november saturday afternoon, not particularly cold, leaves were still falling all over the place, and it was kinda windy.
we live in a rather quiet neighborhood; people sit on their porches and watch their kids play in the yard. it's pretty cool. people waved at me as i walked by. i felt like i was walking through a norman rockwell painting.
until, of course, i walked into the twilight zone.
about two-thirds of the way down the block, i came upon a squat, one-story white clapboard house. i could barely see the front porch for all the shrubs out front. but this was not the weird part. a scrawny, dark-haired young boy, maybe eight or ten years old, bounded off the obscured front porch, carrying an ancient, battered, and partially dismembered upright vacuum cleaner. a long and dirty yellow extension cord snaked across the yard from the pale blue, early 70's-era household appliance back to the house. the kid, totally oblivious to my existence, pushed the carpet cleaner off of the sidewalk and onto the grass, then turned it on. since the bag was missing, the vacuum merely sucked the leaves from the grass and tossed them up into the air through the hole in the top of the machine's base. the little kid then set about pushing this derelict vacuum cleaner around the front yard, like a seasoned housewife quickly cleaning up the living room carpet -- forward and back in perfect rhythm, slightly altering the angle with each stroke so as to make his way slowly across the front yard. the roller and brush left clearly visible marks in the grass, not unlike the stripes they would leave on the freshly cleaned living room carpet; and wherever he pushed the vacuum, no leaves remained --- instead, the crazy young boy was surrounded by a towering column of flying leaves and leaf-dust, resembling the plume of snow kicked up by the blower on a sidewalk snowplow.
i walked within two feet of this kid on my way by his house. i started to say something, along the lines of "so, did your parents ask you to rake the leaves or something?" but the din of the unmuffled vacuum was so loud i couldn't even hear myself think. i just walked on by. he didn't even look up... just kept vacuuming is his front yard.
some day this kid will grow up to be that eccentric old mad scientist up on the hill,who slips in the bathroom and envisions the flux capacitor...
Tue Apr 6 23:45:14 EDT 1999