The Mad Flosser Of Curtis Park

Once in ballet class, I described to one of the dancers one of my multi-tasking, time-saving tricks: when I walk Sparky late at night, I often also floss my teeth.

Because one must master time, rather than let time be the master.

She laughed and said, "Oh, then you must be 'The Mad Flosser Of Curtis Park!'" She laughs about it still.

Last night, I was walking Sparky near Crepeville, and flossing my teeth, when I thought I noticed a strange visual image in the shadows: kind of an amorphous whiteness. I like trying to puzzle out visual images - I've just started assembling a 2000-piece jigsaw puzzle of Times Square that will require months to complete. So, I stared and stared into the shadows, and flossed away, trying to puzzle out the image.

Suddenly the image resolved. Five feet in front of me was a young Hispanic man, age about 19, sitting on his door stoop. While I stared and stared at him, and picked out debris from the gingiva surrounding my first lower right molar, he was examining my every move.

"So, you didn't lose your dog tonight," he quietly said. Oh, now I recognized this fellow! Last week he helped me find Sparky. (The willful canine sometimes crosses the street unbidden in the darkness and drives his master mad). So we talked about the difficulty of finding patches of amorphous blackness like Sparky in the nighttime shadows.

Nice, polite fellow.