Lilith's odd morning

"Hey Jarod!" I yell to my favorite _Lilith Walks_ "character"; "like my shirt?" It's my new somewhat psychedelic Harris / Walz teeshirt. "I love that guy!" he says back. "Other guy is an ass plug. And Trump? OMG, I keep telling my mother what an awful person he is, but my aunty used to own Heald College, and Kamala shut that one down. I want a "Ballz to the Walz" shirt, myself," he adds, amid a hail of references to podcasts and bursts of the f-word. "They're calling him Tampon Tim! But I want my intermediate school daughter to have supplies in the school bathroom." Goes on a bit about evangelicals and why they go for Trump (one belief system makes them susceptible to another.) Leans over to chat with Lilith. He's vaping, and I wonder about the smell. "Oh, it's Susan taking random pictures of me again," he protests. Gets in his car. At the stop sign, he pulls up, yelling, "What the fuuuu?" Across Hui Iwa, we see a lot of police tape, a cop, a guy from DOT. Of course I cross the street. A large patch of the fence is rolled up on the ground. In the culvert, a truck rests, upside down, beside the pig hunter contraption that now sits in shallow water. Happened at 4 a.m. No one found in the truck, which is spilling out with clothes and shoes. "The guy was being chased," a woman with her excited little boy said. "We think he ran." 

 

I asked for Uncle John outside the Temple, where several huge tour buses were parked, with more coming in (backwards, as required). "I want to show him my shirt," I explained. Well, there he was behind me, talking to a guy in a wrong-colored Dodgers cap in a truck. "Oh no!" he says. "Well, I'm going down with the ship; Trump's my man." I said Trump had nothing to say, so he said Harris had nothing to say. Four years of this awful economy. "She gave an economic speech yesterday," I said, to silence. "But she's been in charge for four years!" Anyway, we fist bumped and Lilith and I walked to the top of the cemetery, met a young couple from Buffalo, NY (talked grain elevators and the old train station), and then returned.

 

"See you tomorrow!" John shouted from the crowd of tourists. The upside down truck still in the culvert, a lone policeman kept watch over the yellow tape. Someone would know what to do.