Smitty

While shopping at the local discount store this morning, I heard a voice behind me say, "Well, good morning young lady?"  I was almost afraid to turn around. If you knew my age, you would understand the craziness of the comment.Standing behind me was none other than Smitty himself, smiling as he always does. (I told M that he reminds me of a cheshire cat.  She describes him as the cat that swallowed the canary.  Either way, you get the picture.)   I asked "the cat" what he had been up to since nobody's seen him in a month of Sundays. He has been working for the Council on Aging delivering meals to shut-ins. I asked Helga about this and he hasn’t been to her house making any deliveries. It is a relief for her that she’s not on his route.

Smitty also told me that he’s got other odd jobs, but none pay very much. It makes him feel good, though, to bring some sunshine into the lives of the elderly folks. He kids with them, prays with them and even played Santa Claus at Christmas for them. Or rather some of them. One lady who is somewhat younger than the other women told him there was no way she was going to sit on his lap. His response was that everyone has to sit on Santa's lap and she flat out told him, “No way, you're just too young!!!” I’m thinking he got the Santa Claus job because he was the only one who didn’t need padding for the suit, he's still young enough to bounce someone on his knee and he smiles a lot. Eeewww....

I was still reeling from the stuff he had already told me and it only got more interesting from there. He was running his mouth a mile a minute, and smiling as he led into a conversation about a delivery to one of the elderly ladies on his route. The conversation was about him giving some little old lady a neck and shoulder massage and how much she enjoyed it. No one had done anything like that since “she couldn’t remember when.” Bet not!

Helga has known Smitty for 20 years or more. She used to hunker down and hide if she saw him in Winn-Dixie. He would yell her name across the store and then come up and give her a big bear hug.  You can bet your bottom dollar that if Smitty sees you from a distance he’s going to yell your name and make sure you see him whether you want to or not. M and I have both been known to hide a few times when Smitty has been on the prowl.

When we first moved to the neighborhood, Smitty had a small patio table and two chairs perched on top of his roof. He says it gives him the perfect view for watching fireworks on Memorial Day. He and his friends like to sit on the roof, relax and drink a beer or two or three or four, and so on and so on. They used a ladder to get up and down, but after a while got bored with the ladder and tried doing it the Tarzan way.  They would jump off the roof, grab hold of a branch and swing to the ground.  It worked until one of the Tarzan wannabes missed and landed flat on the ground.  Thankfully he wasn't seriously injured, but after that there wasn't any more monkeying around.