Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

Tales from Exit 22 by Al Batt

The air carried the scent of a dirty athletic sock that had been microwaved.

The fair had ended, and I found myself downwind from a dumpster emitting that lingering stench.

It wasn’t the smell of prize-winning flowers discarded into that large garbage container.

A florist, who I knew a little but not a lot, walked over. We howdied but we didn’t shake. He told me he was buying out a competing florist’s shop if it could be done with a peaceful transfer of flower.

There hadn’t been many dandelions entered into the flower competition at the county fair. There weren’t any. That’s not many. I could have snagged a ribbon by showing one measly dandelion.

There are rumors of winter.

Winter is when we plan ahead by adding “weather permitting” to each proposal on the calendar. “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry” is a famous line from a poem by Robert Burns, written to a mouse whose house gets plowed over by a farmer, despite the mouse’s careful planning.

It’s an August day and aside from the odor, it’s shining like a diamond, but it’s difficult to forget that winter is coming even on a scorching summer day. It’s a simple thing to forget almost everything else.

I try to be in the present. It should be easy. Where else can I go? I try not to consider winter and, instead, hope for a lovely fall. Fall is one of my four favorite seasons. It can give us weather of every description. Sometimes it spends too much of its time reminding us that winter is coming. Fall needs to show some spunk before giving way to winter. I try to enjoy all kinds of weather.

It makes it easier to get by.

I recall a fall day when the wind blew through my buttonhole.

Its force scoured the smile from my face and caused things to whistle, groan and mumble in its path. I was one of the mumbling things.

A cold wind blowing through my buttonhole doesn’t bring comfort or security. I did a project evaluation. I needed a replacement button. I did a cost analysis. I needed a free button. There was only one thing to do. I latched onto my mother’s button jar, which had been passed down to me. It was a big jar. I don’t know what it held originally. Maybe big pickles. Now it held buttons in all the colors of 11 rainbows and of more sizes than I could count on one of my best days.

I looked through buttons galore before choosing three likely suspects. I entered them into a contest, a button-off. I placed each one near the buttonhole to see how the replacement button would get along with the buttons that came with the shirt. None of them matched perfectly, but one came close enough for government work.

Once they had outgrown building snowmen, sledding, tossing snowballs and spirited games of fox and geese, my agrestic elders cared little for winter. They retired to bed as soon as it was dark under the table. They told me that each day I spent in the summer’s sun would warm one of my winter’s days.

We hope for the best, but expect the worst out of our weather.

I worked with a fellow who always checked the seat of the swivel chair at his desk before he sat down. I asked him why. He told me he’d worked for years at a company manufacturing thumb tacks. He’d hoped for the best before sitting down.

Bertrand Russell wrote, “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.”

Using Russell’s wisdom as a guide, we all are baffled by politics, by life and by the weather. The best thing to do, and we should do it soon, is to find a shade tree on a hot day. That shade tree doesn’t need to be an actual tree. It could be a call to a loved one or an old friend for no other reason than “just because.” That shade tree could be a well-wishing note in another’s mailbox.

Warm another’s heart. Winter is coming.

Al Batt’s columns appear in the Tribune every Wednesday.