dang, thought jasper, this is one long and lonely highway.
even longer than the one between thomasville and paris.
and lonelier than the one between harristown and south eden.
jasper had walked a lot of long and lonely highways,
it was what he did.
it was the loneliness that got to him.
jasper liked to talk.
and he had a lot of things to talk about.
but no one who wanted to talk to him about them.
it had not always been this way.
when jasper was a little boy he talked all the time.
nobody paid any attention to him.
but nobody laughed at him or told him to be quiet.
and in those days he did not have so much to talk about.
just the things he saw and experienced himself.
grandpa read the newspaper from front to back every morning.
when grandpa finished with the newspaper he tossed it aside.
jasper, who had learned to read in school, and was the third best reader in the school, would retrieve the paper and read it from front to back.
he liked the comic strips, especially mutt and jeff and the katzenjammer kids, but he liked the front page news about wars and peace treaties even more.
the sports pages and the society pages, not so much.
jasper wanted to talk about the things he read in the paper, especially the wars and peace treaties and the generals in their uniforms and medals and the diplomats in their black top hats, but did not find much of an audience for his observations, especially from mother and grandpa and kid sister sally.
mrs lincoln, the teacher in the little red schoolhouse, told jasper he was a bright boy - meaning the term as a sincere compliment, not as an expression of derision, like the men in the barber shop and the pool hall.
she would have been saddened, but not terribly shocked, to see jasper walking down the long and lonely highway talking to himself.
the moon came up over the highway.
No comments:
Post a Comment