The decrepit adobe building still had a roof, and served as a daily gathering place for the aged of the town. Yes, this building was visited regularly and often, especially seeing as the aged of the town were nearly the only people IN the town, and they were not all that many anyway. The old people of the town lived so because they liked it that way, but company was nice at a time of choosing, and when there were no strings attached, no obligations, no relations. This old adobe building, with its tables covered in used hardware and second hand toys, happened to also possess a decent working coffee maker, which was, if not a great uniting force, at least handy.

Gene and Sadie sat the table as Bill, age 50 and the youngster of the bunch, entered the building and let the door slam behind him.

"Mornin'..." said the newcomer as he headed for the coffee pot.

"Mornin." said the other two, in unison.

WHAP! went the fly swatter.

"Did you get 'im?" Sadie asked of Gene, speaking of the fly.

Gene said he thought so, but could not see any little bodies on the floor or the table, all indicating he just might have put on the wrong glasses this morning.

"What I hate worst of all," said Bill, seating himself, "is when two of the little hunchers land together on your ear and start singing their birthday songs at the top of their lungs...." Here Bill did a fairly decent rendition of two flies BZZZZZZIIINNNNGGGG in a high pitched and shrill squeal.

The other two present, Old Gener and Sadie, they were well over 70 each, just listened at this latest development in the saga of southwest New Mexico and its summertime flies.

Bill was getting red just thinking about it, and it caused him to take a much too large slurp of hot coffee.

"I mean", Bill continued, loudly now, all the more ornery for having burnt his mouth a good one: "Its like they WANT you to hear them, as if it brings them an even greater procreative joy, black maggots with wings fuh-fuh-fornicating on your ear like that. You can even feel the little beggars humping away, its usually like one-two-three and off they go again.

"That's unless you happen to be in possession of a flyswatter in the right hand at the right time, or God forbid a two-by-four, because when the flies do that, you know they are doing it with purpose, and there ain't nothing for it 'cept to destroy that unnatural aberration...if you are carrying a fly weapon of any type when all this goes down, it means you are getting it in the head my friends, whammo, in -- the -- head -- there are just no two ways about it.

This brought cackles. Sadie said she thought they should be called flew swatters, because if they work, the targets are no longer flies, they are flews, and the tool is technically a maker of flews, a flew swatter.

More cackles, another WHAP of the fly swatter, and in walks John closely followed by Kathy. John was the same age as the pope, and was junior in the group only to Elmer, who was five years older than the pope. Elmer had not arrived yet, and no one knew when he would show up, or even if he would. He just dropped in ever so often, on his good days, while out on his morning walk. Anymore, Elmer's good days meant he could make it around the block twice before having to get home in fear of soiling his Depends...oh to hear him go on about it...but Elmer was not arrived and no one knew if he would.

Kathy, who had just turned the big six OH, tried not to act like it was weighing hard on her...she kept a stiff upper lip about it, at least. What else is there to do? Really. These two new arrivals, Kathy and John, headed for the coffee, got theirs, and Kathy made the next pot.

Sadie said her Sis called from St. Petersburg Florida with news -- the 40 year old nephew of hers (Remember the unemployable biker with effeminate leanings?), finally got a job working for a friend of his Uncle, driving a dump truck. Third night on the job, its about 3 AM and he takes his first load from the job site and off to a dump site in a downtown area nearby. After dumping he lets the bucket down, but forgets to disengage it, or lock it, or something. As he is leaving the dump site the bed/bucket of the dump truck begins rising in proportion to the distance traveled; the driver is oblivious of course. He gets almost a full city block before the still rising bed of the dump truck takes out some local high power lines, and Sadies sister said the really regrettable thing is that the unemployable schmuck is now unemployed again, seeing as he lived through the whole ordeal. The incident woke up many people within a mile of the conflagration, because of the shorting out of the transformers and other explosions happening in concert during the event. Some of the old people there in St. Petersburg thought they were under a terrorist attack. Sadie figured that in a way, they were....the cutesie pie biker had his 15 minutes of terrorism whether he chose it or not, and dragged in a bunch of innocents, as is the way of those type. Sadie's sister said the poor boy will never be the same after all this. Sadie thinks he is trying to build a case for welfare.


Bill said hey, accidents happen. "I have two buds who were driving back from Tallahassee one night, trying to get to Miami by sunrise. Around about midnight, somewhere near Kissimee, the driver, Joe, shook the passenger, Gary, awake. Joe asked Gary what the devil he thought that tiny little light off in the distance was, and Gary got a focus on the light Joe was pointing to just about the time BOTH of them realized it was the reflection of the eyeball of some stupid cow standing in the middle of the road!! BANG!" Bill clapped his hands and stomped one foot to relish up this accounting. "When the cow got hit by the car it gave off something like a death scream, going MOOOOOOOO--eeeeeee through the air to its final resting place in the ditch alongside the road."

Bill of course described the sound the cow made as it flew through the air, and that brought a smirk or three from the listeners. The mens car had become a smoking hulk, Joe had a broken arm, and it was pitch black night in the middle of nowhere. As the two mens eyes adjusted to the darkness they also began to hear a sound, odd, funny sounds, then they saw what it was: large herds of cows from the fields on both sides of this country road were now running towards the scene of the mash-up. The noise Gary and Joe were hearing were thousands of hoof beats in relative unison. And the weird noises had just begun! As these two herds got closer to the dead zone, they all began bleating the exact same sound the now inanimate cow had made (MOOOOOOO--eeeee!) as it flew through the air in its death throe/throw.

Heh.

It was over an hour before the next car came along and gave the two men a ride into town, and during that whole time this herbivorous bovine choir remained lined along the fences on both sides of the rode, loudly singing their rendition of -- I AM MISSING YOU -- for their lost comrade.

Kathy, done making coffee now, said she had talked to her sister in Missouri, and her sister had told her that all the hooplah about the bird flu, and even the head cold and other flu types, was just a way for pharmaceutical companies to sell drugs and hurt people. A saline mist, she said, which is basically a salt water spray, can be made from a little rock salt and distilled water, about a teaspoon of salt per gallon of water. When any head cold infection begins, spray/inhale saline mist into the sinus cavities until the symptoms go away. 2 times a day. Usually one spray does it.

Everybody ooohed and ahhhhed over that, and said it could not hurt to try. Everybody also was pretty much in agreement that the oil companies and the pharmaceutical companies are just fronts for satan, and suck pretty bad, so there was that weighing in with this decision, too.

Used to be, 60, 70, and 80 year olds were a very exclusive group with everyone getting their noses out of joint over the littlest thing, all ideologically strapped, and never, EVER, really lightening up. Hard Heads. That's not the way it is now, we are the cool ones getting old now -- overall many things have changed. Somebody had once reminded Sadie that she used to be quite a pot smoker, Sadie said what do you mean USED to be??

John had somehow got going on a story a few here had already heard, but maybe one or two had not. No one interrupted of course. It was about Elizabeth's UFO. Elizabeth was a neighbor of Johns until she passed away at the age of 76 last summer. John always told the story as if he felt cheated that he did not get to see it too.

Elizabeth had gotten up early one morning in the summer, when the early morning is by far the most pleasant time of the day. Going through her morning routine meant going out on the porch to fill the bird feeder there. But this morning was different. As she went out on the porch she noticed something about eye level to her, out over the street in front of the house.

Now even though John was her neighbor, that's really only a word, because there is a lot of land out here, and between folks is generally a lot more land than in the city. A lot more. John actually lives over 1/4 mile down the road from Elizabeth, so it was really no wonder he did not see this, but he was the closest neighbor, that's for sure.

Anyway.

Elizabeth said it froze her in her tracks. She just stopped and watched the whole....situation....transpire. There was something like a rip, in the air, and it was pretty large, it looked like a hole showing....somewhere else. Over there it was raining. Then this machine...like a sphere, came out of that hole in the air, and levitated for about 10 minutes. It proceeded to extrude and extend various antennae or sensing devices (Elizabeth's words -- she was a retired schoolteacher), then the machine went back into the hole, and in a blink, with a slight popping sound, the hole closed and that was that!

Everyone was rapt, listening, and just as the story ended the door slammed. Everyone jumped together, like trained budweiser frogs or something. It was Elmer, who said "Morning", and everyone said morning back, and the old duck proceeded to shuffle over to the coffee machine for a token shot of the brew. He got a third of a cup and took a chair slowly. The group had fractured off into a few sub-conversations as this went on, but as Elmer sat he loudly said "Turrrrrd Pie", an affectation he had somehow acquired and made popular during the last ten years or so...everybody knew it was his way of saying maybe God Damn, just as Sadies way of saying Jesus Christ was saying Judas Priest.

Just as things were getting settled down again after the arrival of the senior in this group of seniors (Elmer) in came Sharon, the only other regular, who got a quick cup and a seat, telling the group: "That crazy cousin of mine in Maine called last night, her Grandpa on her mothers side passed away two nights ago, old man had raised beagles to hunt with, as soon as the old man passed, them dogs started howling and carrying on, and just wouldn't stop!

This caused more true rapture at the coffee table, as this is subject matter of high interest to old people, the older you get the more stuff like this interests you.

"They had to take them down to the vet today and have them all put to sleep, every last one of them, dogs were killing themselves in grief, but how did they know? How did they KNOW?" Sharon took a slurp of coffee and everyone could see she was pretty rattled. She had rattled a few cages herself.

"I mean, its things like this make people ask that question of questions, WHY?" continued Sharon. "Are we part of God that can only get here by being born into these bodies?? That would sure explain all the pain and hate and confusion. But what does that make all other life? A part of God as well, but lesser? As Female and Male are only two halves of God? All lesser forms of the whole...?

For the first time that day things got very quiet.

Then somebody farted. This also occurs more often as one ages.

From John: "What'd that asshole say?"

That brought down the house, and when everyone caught their breath Bill used a line stolen from Elmore Leonard:

"Oh no, now we're all going to get that new kind of AIDS, called HEARING AIDS. You get it from listening to assholes!"

And yet another en masse yukker for the old folks. Its just the way it is.

Whap went the flew swatter.

"Turrrrd Pie," said Elmer, who then went on to relate a short and well known story, referred to by all present as -- Elmer's Favorite Story. He had been telling it a lot lately.

During a short stint in Cleveland, Ohio, for some job he was working on back in the 1970s, Elmer came across something that impressed him no end. Seems a man on a motorcycle got a bad case of road rage at someone else during rush hour traffic one day, so this biker followed the other person home to see where they lived. The biker then went and got a shotgun from his own house, went back, knocked on the door, and blew the person who answered it right away. Keeled Dem Ded.

The twist was this: the biker had gone back with the shotgun, and in all the confusion had picked the wrong house, and killed a totally innocent person, or at least the WRONG person. When it all unraveled later it became, to Elmer at least, one more shining example of ridiculous, violent, and comically perverted behavior on planet Earth.

Turd Pie Indeed.

No one interrupted Elmer as he finished his story and then Elmer got up in as much of a hurry as he was capable of, and left with a quick goodbye and a wave. At Elmer's age, actions are not always explicable, and how things fall most times just depends...

Bill said he got word on the internet that the government was doing some human experimentation out around this area, which consisted of an expanded process he had first heard about from a guy who had once spent 6 months in a military prison in the 1970's for selling LSD. This dude had told him they tested something electronic and gastric related for the last 30 days he was in that prison, and it was not fun. This weapon attacks a person or group by completely or partially shutting down the persons ability to eliminate waste. The weapon can kill someone, or can cause lots of disease, and these buck rogers raygun operators can also turn a persons functioning back on at any time, like dial-a-poop. They like to play around with making unknowing test subjects crap their drawers at the funniest times. Overall the experimentation now has to do with chemical indundations, satellites, and antennae. Just one of many experiments happening in the land of terror and the skeered. Bill said he thought homeland security was the new SS, and a lot of people were being sucked into it because they lost their jobs or are afraid they will lose retirement benefits if they do not play along.

This caused some muttering about. No one present cared much for the government and most there considered themselves part of an elite who truly understood how shabby things really are in the USA. They were sadly mistaken and naive, livng in LaLa land, as it were, but at least they tried.

Gene spoke then. "There goes the mailman," he said.

A turning point in the day, like another step forward. A facet of cadence if you will, something unforeseen that WILL be seen if one lives long enough, once the years start galloping along like a show pony on too many sugar cubes. And they do.

Pray it does not become boring.

Don't let it become boring.


Fin