Fantasy, Glory and Everything In Between

Oscar Pistorius, where people know him best - on the track. (AFP/Getty Images photo)

I think it’s time for a new Fantasy League.

Just take any famous sports figure, preferably one who is held up as a pantheon of virtue, and give them 100 points. Then come up with a point system that little by little chips at that century mark and see who gets to zero first.

Maybe just 10 points off for driving drunk. Screaming obscenities at an official … meh, just a few points here or there. Peformance-enhancing drugs? That’s worth some points, too. Sex offenses pile up the points even faster, beating up a spouse or significant other would certainly be a high-ticket offense. Perhaps a commissioner would have to set the bar as to what a murder would rate.

Because, really, how we look at athletes and celebrities is nothing more than a fantasy. If the last year or so hasn’t proved that to people, nothing ever will.

This week’s arrest of sprinter Oscar Pistorius on charges that he murdered his girlfriend is just one more smack across the head to remind people that watching someone do something glorious on TV doesn’t automatically turn them into a perfect person.

We like the fantasy. We like it when Pistorius and his blades challenge the notion of speed and what someone minus two legs can do. We really like it when a guy like Lance Armstrong can overcome cancer, get back on a bike and climb a mountain. We love the idea of a Joe Paterno, a kindly father figure who we can look to for old-school guidance in our new-fangled world.

But if people we know and love can shock and disappoint us on a regular basis, why shouldn’t a total stranger? Because, when it comes down to it, they are strangers. Only in the fantasy are they people we know.

There’s often been a disconnect among the things athletic heroes do, that somehow they don’t add up. The problem is, just like for you and me, they do add up. They add up to someone being wholly human.

There’s also been a disconnect in people’s perceptions, particularly about athletes. They are the gladiators of our day and we ascribe to them so much of what we want to be while forgetting they are also made out of the things we all are. To think Pistorius wouldn’t shoot his girlfriend because he rose up against so much adversity, or that Armstrong wouldn’t cheat because he overcame cancer is as logical as saying someone is more likely to shoplift because they have blue eyes.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, for the same reasons as anybody else. Silly reasons, actually, that point out that we just don’t know a dang thing.

In 1994, I was covering the NCAA women’s basketball championship game that North Carolina won on a buzzer-beater. There was pandemonium in the locker room after; these women were, deservedly, over the moon with happiness. They screamed, they danced. They jumped on a bench and danced some more. The bench broke, sending players flying and a few sports writers, too.

I don’t remember exactly how I ended up on the locker room floor, with my leg a little cut up by the splinters from the busted bench. The players got up and continued to celebrate, but one turned around, offered a hand to help me get up and asked me if I was OK.

It was the Tar Heels’ speedy little freshman point guard who had opted for a basketball scholarship even though the track world was waiting with baited breath for what she could accomplish there. She was cute as a bug and had the Tar Heel logo painted on her face like she was a kid at a carnival. Her name: Marion Jones.

Stripped gold medals and a prison sentence later, that’s how I still remember Marion Jones. It’s why when her name first surfaced in connection with performance-enhancing drugs, I was genuinely upset. Surely, it was the fault of her good-for-nothing husbands, I originally believed. She was so sweet to help me up off the floor, was the thought, she wouldn’t cheat.

Of course, that’s as logical as your mother telling you when you were a kid that if you continued to make that face, your face would stay that way.

My face of disappointment didn’t stay that way. Sad to say it’s been replaced by a face of skepticism, that even a jaw-dropping charge like the one against Oscar Pistorius inspires not much more than a shrug from me. It's too bad. There are a lot of good people out there and some of them are athletes.

I want to believe, I really do.  I also wish there was a Santa Claus and that I owned an Invisibility Cloak.  But the hero worship for me, these days, is a fantasy that is out of my league.

Olympic gold medalist Marion Jones' illustrious track career ended with tears outside a federal courthouse and a prison sentence. (AP photo)

Screw Up, Repent, Cash In, Repeat

For Lance Armstrong, redemption starts with talking to Oprah. (OWN photo)

I am so tired of the redemption story.

I’m tired of it because it is a cliché. I’m tired of it because it turns suckers into an awful lot of people. I’m tired of it because it lets way too many people off the hook.

Before you think I’m terribly hard-hearted and cynical, understand that I don’t think redemption is bad. It’s necessary and it’s inspiring, particularly when it truly galvanizes someone’s humanity instead of, say, landing them endorsement deals and a fat contract.

The redemption story, though, is another … well … story. You know how it goes: Athlete/actor/public figure/business person pretty much destroys their life and maybe someone else’s. Then they clean up their life and the world embraces them. Big pay day ensues. Happy ever after. The end.

That’s why I’m so uncomfortable with the Lance Armstrong story these days. Quite frankly, I would have held him in higher regard if he had just kept up with the denials and accusations. But to go on “Oprah” and admit you’re a flawed human being? What a cliché.

This ennui with the redemption story isn’t just about Lance Armstrong, though. For me, it’s the way it’s become just too easy with a fawning public and a culpable media to tell that same old story. Those with a comeback story are placed upon a pantheon that seems hard to reach for those who never screwed up to begin with. Solid, dependable, trustworthy success is just too boring for our culture, and that is truly sad.

In a long journalism career, I’ve done one comeback story that I can recall. And it’s why I’ll never do another one. A former star athlete blew away (literally) his career; this was the 1980s and cocaine was everywhere. Now he was cleaned up and working at a local business and talking to kids about how he’d screwed up his life.

It was only later, when I was older and more cynical, that I realized how perfect that PR was for the business he had now chosen and felt a little squeamish about that. I also got an anonymous call from a very angry woman who had been the victim of some bad stuff this guy had done. She didn’t think it had to be in the story, she just wanted me to know who it was we were trying to make look so good.

I felt bad for her, but it was only later when I actually became the victim of a crime that I realized what these redemption stories must be like to people on the other side of the story. I vowed never to do one again, and so far, I haven’t. Not one like this.

Yet they’re there, everywhere. As the Baltimore Ravens’ Ray Lewis is celebrated in these, his final days as a pro, few mention a situation he was involved in years ago in which a two young men were murdered. The men's families remember, though.

The redemption story is but one of many clichés the willing media and the naive public lap up. The problem is, people recognize they need an angle and try to sell themselves in such a way.

I recently got a story pitch from a new business owner wanting me to do a story on his business. I said we’d print some information that the new business opened, but wouldn’t do a full story. “What about a story about a black man opening a business?” was the response. “Did you really have to go there?” I wanted to say.

I also got a story pitch from a PR person wanting me to write article about her CEO client, a woman. The story pitch? About the challenges of a woman working in a man’s world. I wanted to tell the PR person that as a former sports writer, I could probably teach her client a thing or two about working in a man’s world.  I also wanted to ask her who set the time machine back to 1973.

It all reminds me of the great line from “Muriel’s Wedding,” when Muriel follows the cluster of young women on their vacation until they get fed up with her.

“You’ve got no dignity, Muriel,” one of them cruelly says as she walks away.

Dignity. It’s a lost art. Maybe finding a little bit of it is all the redemption we need.

Townie Time

A big clue you might be a townie: Birthday greetings wished to you on the bowling alley's sign.

When you belong in a community, the big things to you are not the things that make the big news. Oh sure, there’s a new strip mall going up and the mayor is running for re-election, but for a lot of people in my town the big deal this month is that a woman named Joan is retiring from the post office.

The friendly faces you see every day are part of what makes a community, no matter what the size of a place. But being bummed the woman at the post office is retiring just drove home one more time the truth that is impossible to ignore: I am a townie.

In many ways, this is no surprise, it’s just been tough to admit. As one who lived in cities my whole adult life until moving back to my hometown 29 years after I left here for college, as one who can wander the streets of London and New York and not get lost, admitting the townie thing can make me a bit sheepish.

Yet it’s been there, since almost the beginning. Like everything else, the first step is acknowledging it. And there have been so many steps along the way, it really should have been obvious. Because you know you are a townie when:

● You still call people “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” usually former teachers and parents of people you went to school with once upon a time.

● You spend way more time than you ever thought you would at the funeral home.

● Someone calls the local coffee shop looking for you.

● You ask an acquaintance if you can come over sometime and look at her house because she lives in a house you spent a lot of time in as a kid and are curious what it looks like now.

● You ask the young cashier at the grocery store what she’s majoring in, and when she says elementary education,  your first thought is, “Oh good, she's such a nice girl.”

● You splurge for a landline and keep a listing in the local phone book because you’re involved in so many things that people of all ages, some who might not be tech-savvy, really do need to be able to find you.

● While out for a walk and wondering what time it is, you look up to see what the bank clock says even though the clock has been gone for 20 years.

● You are introduced to someone and you say, “Oh, I used to babysit you.”

● You are introduced to someone and they say, “Oh, you used to babysit me.”

● You recognize, from a block away, that the woman walking down the street was your third-grade teacher because she is wearing the same style cardigan and scarf as she did when she was your teacher in 1969.

● You have practically memorized the phone number of the strictest teacher you had in grade school because you call her up so often for various community events you are both part of.

● You still miss the A&W.

● You tell a real estate agent, “If the street wasn’t there when I was in high school, I don’t want to live on it.”

● You tell someone “OK” when they suggest a lunch spot that hasn’t had that particular name for about 40 years.

● As soon as the weather turns cold, you start asking the folks at the local meat market when their winter sale is happening.

● You are quite accustomed to people jumping out of their cars and taking pictures of that meat market, because it is called Dick’s Quality Meats.

This list wouldn’t be exclusive to a small town; no doubt people have strong connections in their neighborhoods in cities, too. Indeed, when the grocery store my friends shop at in Des Moines rebuilt elsewhere on its site and rearranged its parking lot, you would have thought their world was turned upside down. Because it kind of was.

As a small-town townie, sure, there are things people you barely know end up knowing about you. It’s weird and it’s wonderful and it’s not for everyone. But the prize is a sense of belonging, the feeling that you’re all kind of in this together.

Well, that and a big meat sale.

This grocery store sold T-shirts last year. They sold out.

Bowled Over by 'Tradition'

A decidely lo-fi Black Friday ad in Mineral Point, Wis.

It began, as so many things in my life do, as a search for good cheese. 

Somehow, though, it turned into a perfect escape on day in which so many people escape into a certain kind of crazy. Suddenly, there’s been no more perfect way to spend Black Friday than to wander the main streets of some of the area’s loveliest towns.

Strangely, though, I get the more popular option. It’s not for me, but I’ve had a unique view at it and can’t say it’s all bad. People fighting over a slow cooker is pathetic, people getting injured is tragic and people waiting outside for days embarrasses me as a human being.

That’s why on last year’s Black Friday, I had the day off and drove the opposite way from the mall. It wasn’t a concerted effort to have the anti-Black Friday (or, as I’ve come to call it, Lo-Fi Black Fri), it was indeed a trip to buy cheese. November is release time for the famed 15-Year Cheddar made by Hook’s Cheese Co. in Mineral Point, and it makes a nice gift if you can afford to splurge.

Cheese purchased, I looked around and saw the inviting decorations in town and stuck around for a while. Mineral Point is a town I’ve been to hundreds of times in my life, but had never seen it at the holidays. It was settled by Cornish lead miners in 1827, amazingly early for a Midwestern community. To this day it remains a slice of England in an area surrounded by German, Norwegian and Irish settlers. To be there around Christmas kind of felt like being in a Dickens village; indeed Main Street there is called High Street, as is the case in English cities and towns.

That getaway was a perfect tonic to how I had spent the previous two Black Fridays: at the mall, at 5 a.m. or so.

The life of a journalist is one where you end up places you’d never imagine yourself to be. The mall on Black Friday would be right up there with, say, an Amana Colonies restaurant eating wienerschnitzel with Ashton Kutcher or a murder scene. For two years, however, I was a retail reporter and this was my gig.

The tough part of being a retail reporter was that I hate shopping more than almost anything in the world. I understand that covering retail would have appeal for many of my friends and colleagues, but to those I know who hate sports, I said, “Imagine if you walked in to work one day and now covered college football.” They usually turned pale at the thought.

Yet on a human level, covering Black Friday was fascinating. At the soul of most journalists is a curiosity about what people are doing and, most importantly, why. Black Friday provided the perfect opportunity to learn about both.

And it was a fascinating revelation. Beyond the strange sight of people around me lugging around sale-priced shop-vacs was the sight of families together. I’d interview people who were here from all over the country because they were visiting family and this is what they did together the day after Thanksgiving.

I bumped into acquaintances or high school classmates and met their moms, sisters or daughters. I saw groups of families in matching T-shirts, for whatever theme they chose for the day. I didn’t see very many children. I saw a mall full of people who utterly understood what they were doing was ridiculous, but found a goofy sort of fun in it all.

There’s been a lot of hand-wringing this holiday season about the people who have to work on Thanksgiving and a lot of judgment about the people who choose to go shopping. I feel bad for those who work on holidays, particularly a cousin who works at a department store.

At the same time, though, you have to ask the question: Is this really taking away family time? You eat, you nap, you watch football … then what? A lot of these folks are at the mall, but they are with their families.

Black Friday crowds not a problem.

Several Christmases ago, after the presents were opened and the meal eaten and the dishes done, my family decided to go bowling. It seemed so un-Christmas that we called to make sure an alley was open. When we got there, we were stunned: The place was packed. At each lane, there was a group of people who looked enough like each other that you knew that this was a bowling alley full of families. We got in there just in time; about an hour later, we started hearing announcements that so-and-so’s lane was open. There was a waiting list to bowl at 10 p.m. on Christmas Day.

This year, I avoided the mall again and chose another small town to wander. It’s tempting to feel smug and superior about such choices, but I’ll reserve judgment.

After all, you may not ever see me at the mall on Black Friday, but somewhere in the basement near my holiday decorations is a bag with a 12-pound ball and some size-9 shoes. 

I'll have them ready. Just in case.

Poll Workers and Church Ladies: A Winning Ticket

Why would this guy want a fake I.D.? To vote, of course.

If early exit polls are any indication, I may be the only one at my polling place on Tuesday.

Suddenly, early voting has become all the rage. My friends are giddily announcing on Facebook that they voted, they’re already proudly wearing their “I Voted” stickers and Michelle Obama’s sponsored Twitter feed tells me that voting early “is easy.”

I never realized that voting the regular way was so difficult.

Some people wanting to vote early even lined up before offices were open, as if they were waiting for a new iPhone or Peter Frampton tickets circa 1977.

Believe me, I’m thrilled about the enthusiasm for voting. When it comes to casting a ballot, I turn into Anthony Michael Hall in “The Breakfast Club.” You know, the guy who has the fake I.D. so he can vote.

I’m happy people have the options to vote early or absentee. But as long as I don’t have a conflict that will keep me out of my local community center on whatever Tuesday I need to be there, I will show up there in person to cast my ballot.

It’s not because I don’t have faith in the system that is allowing early voters, it’s because I have such faith in the people who are there at my polling station. And if I didn’t get to vote I wouldn’t see them, and that would bum me out as much as my candidates not winning.

Every time I go to the polls, I see the mothers of high school classmates, or women whose children I or my sisters babysat. My mom worked polls, too, and even helped local nursing home residents fill out their absentee ballots if they couldn’t vote in person.

“It was so tempting not to cheat with the blind ones,” my mom said a few years ago.

But of course she never would.  None of these women would. Because there’s an honesty and integrity they bring to this, the same way this generation brought honesty and integrity to so much community service in the decades before.

When I see my mother's generation still working the polls, it makes me wonder about my own generation. Will we be sitting in those same seats one day soon, doing our part for democracy? Does a lack of people my age in certain roles mean community service has declined or has the way of serving one’s community changed?

Across the U.S., membership in service organizations has gone down. In 2008, the Jaycees of Janesville, Wis., disbanded. This is no speck on the map; this is a small city of 65,000 people. The Masons, so creepily portrayed in films such as “The Da Vinci Code” or “National Treasure” have seen their U.S. membership tumble from 4 million in 1959 to 1.5 today, USA Today reported. The Elks and Rotary clubs also report declining membership, while the Lions recently announced a bump in membership after years of decline.

And while polls and surveys can vary wildly to measure how religious Americans are these days, a 2010 religious census said only 48.8 percent of Americans belong to a church. A Pew Center study from this summer says 19 percent of Americans claim to have no religious affiliation, the highest mark ever. The Catholic parish in which I was raised has two Masses on the weekend, down from four when I was a kid.

Beyond religion, there is a role churches play in a community that cannot be denied. Fewer church-goers means fewer Church Ladies and that makes me wonder who will be preparing all the wonderful Church Lady food for future generations. At the church luncheon after my mother’s funeral, we were all served marvelous food by her peers, not younger members of the parish. It was clear that there isn’t a new generation of Church Ladies waiting in the wings to slather butter on ham sandwiches and whip up a mean bowl of Jell-O. Indeed, it seems criminal to me that I only get good, tangy German potato salad when somebody dies.

This isn’t to say men and women under the age of 70 aren’t serving their communities. I’ve gone to many fundraisers organized by people my age and younger and most small towns are bravely served by volunteer firefighters and EMS squads. 

But sadly, because of technology, laws and the march of time, the generation that has served us so well at the polls is going away. There’s already confusion for poll workers because of changes in election laws and court challenges to the changes in election laws that take some new rules out of the process but put some other new ones in. Add to that the potential for having to check out someone’s smartphone to confirm their identity from an online bill receipt, and many of these poll workers are bowing out.

Part of what angers me about all the meddling with voter laws is how some people imply that poll workers aren’t doing their jobs. To me, questioning the process is like insulting Mrs. Schulz, Mrs. Miller, Mrs. Roth, Mrs. Hefty, Mrs. Fargo and my buddy Ken, a peer who is trying with middling success to get more people our age to work the polls.

One day, when my job doesn’t create a conflict to participate, I’ll be there at a table handing out the ballots. But for now, I’ll get my ballot from the people I’ve known all my life, people who have helped create the wonderful community in which I so proudly live.

They’ve done their part. Let’s make sure we whipper-snappers do ours, too.

You just know all these Church Ladies had awesome potato salad recipes.

Monuments to Life, Not Death

A living room with a view -- of the cemetery. (Cyril Burns photo)

Not very many kids came trick-or-treating at our house.

To a young child, logic never prevailed. My sisters and I never realized it was because there was a gas station on one side of our house, a dentist on the other, an alley in the back and a highway across the front.

We didn't exactly live in a residential area.

That would have made great sense when trying to figure out why there were few knocks on our door each Oct. 31. But what made the most sense to our young minds was what we saw out the kitchen window every time we did the dishes -- the cemetery.

We thought kids were afraid to come to our house across the highway from Mount Horeb (Wis.) Union Cemetery, but we couldn't imagine what was so frightening about the place. It wasn't full of dead people, as our friend liked to point out. It was full of people who used to live.

My parents subtly introduced us to life solely by taking us on walks through the cemetery. There was the teen-age boy who was the first person buried in the cemetery in the 1800s; it wasn't uncommon for kids that young to die of diseases that are easily cured now, Mom said. There was another teen-age boy who died of a heart attack playing basketball; from that we learned that life is full of the unexpected -- good or bad.

Sometimes our parents or baby sitter would stop at the graves of people they knew and tell us something about them. Not every single one, of course, but it gave me the feeling that to every headstone there was a name, to every name there was a life.

But they weren't always deep, introspective walks through the cemetery. On the contrary. The place was a great playground. Plastic flowers everywhere, rabbits and gophers tearing up the ground. And in case you're curious, granite tombstones are a lot easier to climb than marble ones. It sounds disrespectful, but I think I would rather have children climbing all over my gravestone than adults weeping over it.

We never noticed the cemetery. It was just always part of the background, the piece of land between our house and the Johnsons'. We just took it for granted that it was there, which sometimes got in the way of decorum.

There was that fall day when I was in our driveway and I heard a sound like a shotgun. I thought it was either a car backfiring or these neighbor boys of ours hunting for rabbits in the cemetery. So I screamed, "Ugh, you got me," as loud as I could as I feigned death upon the family car.

My sister turned ashen and informed me there was a military funeral across the road. We bolted into the house as fast as we could and later found out from my father, one of the American Legion military shooters, that nothing noticeably odd had happened at the funeral.

Embarrassing, yes, but I chalk it up to the foolish days of  youth. I was 25 at the time.

Seeing funerals going on was odd. Granted, funerals aren't generally an invitation-only affair, but it still seemed strange having such a private event going on across the road.

When most people look out their kitchen windows, they see children riding by on bicycles or mail carriers traipsing up the sidewalk. Not  us; even if we didn't mean to, we'd still see the most grief-stricken moments of people's lives. Seeing this usually came with a hint of guilt, even if it was an accidental glance. It was like stealing a moment of their privacy, but they didn't know it.

Friends visiting after school would stare out the window at people visiting the graves. This is where I would get a little testy.

Look who's there, they'd say.

It's none of our business, I'd respond, and find us something else to do.

On vacation in Europe years later, my companions were spooked by the cemetery right under our hotel window in Salzburg, Austria. I thought it was great, especially when we checked it out the next day and found out Mozart's family was buried there. On a New York vacation, my friends and I did just about everything we wanted to do except see graveyards. Some people thought it was morbid to even connsider that as part of a vacation.

Cemeteries are not like notches on a stick, counting off who has died. They are not to be feared. They are monuments to life.

This post originally appeared as an essay in the Des Moines Register.

The ghost is across the street from the cemetery: During this summer's drought the outline of the family house that was razed seven years ago returned.

Wanted: Town Character

Barney and Andy had to deal with Otis, the town drunk, but they did so with neighborly kindness.

I miss Santa

I don’t mean the guy who busts into your house and brings you a few things from your Wish List each December.

The Santa I miss certainly had a white beard, dressed in red and had a pointy red cap.

He also walked the streets of my town all summer long, in shorts with red and white striped socks, while also making appearances at just about any public event that took place here. He cut quite the figure at the Lions Club bingo tent at the local carnival and his red hat could be seen popping out of the crowd at a school concert. Someone started a Facebook page dedicated to him.

But as quickly and randomly as the man everyone in town called Santa arrived, he also disappeared.

And no one I know seems to know where Santa went.

I miss Santa.

Santa was the latest in a not-very-long line of people you could best describe as Town Characters. I say it’s not a long line, because Santa’s predecessors held their titles for an awful long time. And it always seems when one went away, another magically showed up. It was as if somewhere, unknown to the rest of the world, there was a job board for Town Characters and it announced when and where there were openings.

We have an opening now in my town.

Every town and city has not just the local “characters” but people who are consistently there – in the background, on the street corners. What movies get wrong with extras is having different people in the backgrounds; they should have the same people there in the background, just like they often are in everyday life. Some are indeed characters, others might have drinking issues that label them so tactlessly as the town drunk. Others might be people with physical or mental disabilities that put them on a different path than most. But they are there, always there and part of the community, too.

When I lived in Des Moines, there were three: I called them Running Man, who was often seen running down the street in jeans and long-sleeved shirts; Waving Man, who stood on street corners and waved at everyone who drove by; and Box Man, who wandered the city always carrying a box.

On a recent trip back to Des Moines, I was pleased to see that Waving Man is still there, waving away at those who drive by. Many of my friends refer to him as “Mr. Happy,” and also delight in seeing him day in and day out.

Box Man wasn’t so much a character, it turns out, as a man with a mission. A friend of mine saw him at a baseball game and chatted with him. Turns out Box Man spent a lot of his spare time in search of cans and bottles, taking advantage of Iowa’s 5-cent deposit law. He made as much as $3,000 a year, just returning cans and bottles. My friend wanted to write a story about him; Box Man didn’t want the IRS on his case and politely declined.

Sometimes all it takes is a conversation with the Town Characters and you might find out there is a story there. I bumped into Santa at a garage sale and found out he had been an antiques dealer, and he was able to point out to the garage sale host that the candlesticks she was selling were more valuable than the dollar she was asking for. He also told the story of needing a heart operation a few years back and how upset he was that the doctors were going to have to trim his beard.

“I need the beard,” he said he told his doctors. “The kids call me Santa.” But alas, they shaved the beard anyway. It grew back and Santa was back in business.

It’s probably easier to be a Town Character in a small town, particularly one such as mine that sort of welcomes eccentrics more than many other small towns.

But it’s not a special tolerance that likely makes a small town a better place for those who walk a different path; it’s just that in the small town, we might know who these people are and what their stories are.

I thought of this the other day as I was out for a morning walk. I encountered Benny, who I often see walking the streets and roads of my town. Benny’s not that much older than me, and I believe he was seriously injured in a car accident years ago when I lived away. He’s not a town character so much as a recognizable figure to anyone who lives here.

On the bike path, Benny came toward me flashing a cross and saying, repeatedly, “She said see me in heaven. She said see me in heaven.”

In a bigger city or another place, I might have been a little afraid and avoided him. Instead, I looked closer at the cross Benny showed me, made from twigs glued to a piece of metal. He turned it over, and there was a thermometer.

Benny pointed to the sky. “She said see me in heaven,” he said, shook my hand and waved as he walked away.

Benny’s just a guy around town, looking forward to seeing someone someday in heaven. For now, I’m looking forward to meeting the next Town Character, whoever he or she may be.

And in this town, it’s a pretty good gig. You might even get your own Facebook page.