Every few months the residents of our street band together to tidy up the park, clearing any litter, digging out weeds and pruning trees and bushes. Today was that day again, so out I went with wheelbarrow and cutters to do some work.
There was a scruffy guy with a big beard and a hi-viz jacket hanging around, and I wasn’t sure if he was homeless or somebody from the city sent to help out. Then he came over and started talking to people, and told them they were antisocial if they didn’t want to engage with him.
That was probably because he had a long and rambling story about Joseph Sawlt, one of the religious odd jobs who used to have the sect where the park is now, and I got stuck talking to him about how there was a special painting made of Sawlt that had gone missing from a VA hospice 30 years ago, and how he needed help finding it.
I should have just gone back to pruning and told him he should take it up with the VA, but there was a relentless ramble from him, which involving handing me a colour print off of what appears to be the Gospel of Sawlt, an eccentrically spelt story of how Sawlt goes to Tacoma one day and repairs the broken axle of a truck just by touching it. Jesus as auto mechanic? Oh, and choice things like "it’s suspicious that all the senators in Washington are women. We’ll never understand women."
Eventually he wandered off, stopping to annoy our next door neighbours by knocking on their door, aggrieved that another cult member had lived in that house decades ago and didn’t any more. I went back to pruning bushes.