Swimming-pool Shapes in Perspective.

 

There's a swimming pool in our local area which is shaped, weirdly enough, like a bird in distress. And there's a not insubstantial group who sometimes goes there, who, if I'm being honest, believes they have a right to keep certain things not just private, but actively secret. For example, when I took it upon myself to ask the tallest one what his favorite color was, you know what he said? He asked if I'd like to join him for dinner later. In the trade, this is what we call 'classic evasion'. I knew a ruse when I spotted one and this one wasn't smelling very funny, if you ask me.

When I traced his '98 Buick LeMans to the parking annex of the First Baptist Church in Owensville, Nebraska, I left a business size manila folder near a park about a mile away in the hopes that this wouldn't give me away. Once I started to focus on his troubled marital history, I knew that something just wasn't quite right. Or I might have said that something just didn't add up. Whichever way I, or anyone, might say or write it, you can tell I was stumped. Once I got back into school in a supervisory capacity, I ran his numbers and came up empty. Except for one very particular number. And that number was: 792.

A lot of folks are wondering, and have for quite a long time, why is seven hundred and ninety-two such a weird number? It could be something about the way it looks. Also the way it sounds if you say it aloud; even more so if you learn to say it backwards. Forward or backward, it has this funny way of getting people in trouble. There's a rumor that someone died but there's nothing to back that up.

Two months later, when I looked up and saw him standing inside my shaving mirror, I immediately knew where I'd seen him before: a backyard barbecue in Murphysboro, Tennessee on October 7, 1956. He was the guy who insisted that he was a real Grade A know-it-all. I knew that he had a 'thing' for stuff like that. He could tell I wasn't kidding. The next morning I rushed him into surgery. Even after the operation he swore that I'd stolen his wife's pincushion. Please let the record show that this is impossible. Why? It happens that I am violently allergic to pincushions and have been since I was a kid. So there!

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