Somebody had let another Monday in.

Everything looked familiar in unfamiliar ways.

I was away from home, but not that far away. I was traveling for work. I’m a traveler.

Wherever you go, there you are.

I thought of that truism as I gnawed on a bit of peanut brittle. I ate peanut brittle because that’s what I had.

“Well, as I live and breathe while standing under a strong light. You look like somebody I should know,” a fellow not far from me bellowed.

“There is no reward offered,” I replied, hoping he found that informative.

I should have checked first to see if he was talking to me, but I hadn’t. He could have been talking on a cellphone or talking to himself. I talk to myself regularly. I’ll bet most people do. It doesn’t mean a person has cobwebs in his attic. We practice what we are going to say. We say what we wished we’d have said. We give ourselves pep talks. I should have checked where his words were aimed, but I hadn’t. It turned out that he was talking to me.

He walked toward me. A mistake. One should never approach a bull from the front, a horse from the rear or a fool from any direction.

We talked. Small talk and smaller talk. He knew me and I bided my time, hoping that something he said would jog my memory into recognizing him. That didn’t happen. It hurt to have to do so, but I asked him who he was.

I didn’t know him, but he was originally from the same neck of the woods as I am and he knew my family. He had moved away long ago. He asked if the mosquitoes were as bad as they used to be where I lived.

“Worse,” I said. “The mosquitoes now use GPS technology to find their victims.”

“Uffda,” he commiserated. “When I was a runny-nosed rugrat, the smallest skeeters were the size of hawks. My family lived in an old farmhouse that became too hot to sleep in on those hot, muggy summer nights. Us kids would sleep on the open front porch of the house. I could have slept like a winter woodchuck if it hadn’t been for those blasted mosquitoes. One night, they were so bad, I crawled under the big metal tub that Grandma sometimes used to give a baby a bath. Those mosquitoes started drilling holes in that metal tub! I had a hammer with me. I’d used it to fend off those biting insects. As each proboscis popped through the metal, I hit it with the hammer, clinching it. I did this to a dozen mosquitoes until they finally flew away with the tub and dropped it on my older brother, who blamed me. Some of my childhood is just beyond the reach of my memory. I should have written things down, but it was the stubby-pencil era.”

“It’s always something,” I say, nodding.

Then the real story started. The man knew the place I’d grown up on. His father had told him about a traveler who had come to that farm to do a little work for food and shelter before hitting the road again. There were wanderers in those days, men unable to stay in one place for long. They were men who could keep secrets. History was a lie agreed upon. This one was named Joe. Or maybe he wasn’t. He hadn’t worked long on that farm before he became ill and soon died. They buried him in a fence line. Maybe there had been a grave marker. A couple pieces of wood joined together. Maybe there hadn’t been.

I’d heard this story before. That fence line had been removed before we knew about Joe. No offense was intended.

Old newspaper accounts often mentioned someone succumbing to sunstroke in the heat of summer. My grandmother said that men regularly tipped over due to “old man’s disease.” That was pneumonia brought on by any of a number of conditions.

Dylan Thomas wrote this in 1947, “Do not go gentle into that good night, old age should burn and rave at close of day; rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

I don’t know what got Joe or if he’d had the opportunity to rage against the dying of the light, but a stranger and I remembered Joe without ever knowing him. He was a fellow traveler. Someone needed to say some words. I did.

“Wherever you go, there you are.”

Al Batt’s columns appear every Wednesday and Sunday.