Silver Fox

Every morning since school has started, I hook up the Ladybug to the Simple Seven and make the jaunt to Kindergarten.

After I dropped SF off at school, I did my usual trek with The Chidler and then hopped into the bath. I gave myself the normal dose of Patchouli and forgot about it. I headed off to meet my friend Katy to work on "Database Applications". Joy.

We worked for a few hours and I went home just in time to hook my kit back up and pick up My Charge from school. A few weeks after school started the usual crossing guard started training a newbie to take over.

The Newbie is a 60-70 something codger with a beer belly who wears a "Tomahawk Community Bank" chocolate brown polyester trucker's hat(complete with hatchet graphic) and drives a sanitary looking forest green Toyota 4x4 Truck with a tidy matching topper.

Recently he flies solo. No babysitter.

His shocking white hair peeks out from under the edges of his cap and he wears square gold metal rimmed glasses with thick brown tinted lenses. In his DayGlo Chartreuse vest, he attempts to dissuade the local flow of traffic to "STOP!". Sign clenched tight in his suntanned, meaty fist, I always make sure to wait until the traffic stops to step off the curb because people are mostly drunk or blind at that time of day around here.

As he brought me across the Avenue in the direction of pick up he says,

"You smell good!" in his scratchy, crunchy, slightly nasal old guy voice.

"Thanks" I said, feeling a weird glaze pour across my face. Do I eeeeeeeeeuuuuuuu or do I ahhhhhhhhhhhh? How funny, bizarre and cool is it for a Grandpa to dig the Patchouli? As a friend of mine pointed out, "Take it as a compliment. Someday -- if we're lucky -- we all end up as senior citizens. It just happens."

I decided to ahhhhhhh.