eople say that when anything happens to me, everyone knows about it. My kidney stone got more word-of-mouth (mostly my mouth) coverage than had it been a meteor burning its way towards a doomed Earth (and knowing my luck, it would be cloudy that last night so my telescope would be useless).

But I digress. The point is that I’m a storyteller. Incidents are epics. Events are miniseries. Granted, I’m not like some (using a cartoony voice when straw-manning some person who has annoyed me in a later recount). I keep my stories honest. I just don’t keep them short.

Same with the blog. The things I write about here are usually tiny thoughts that pop into my head, which I catch in my desperate hands, stick in a jar and examine at leisure. If something fleeting comes to me about writing, media, a written praise, a nice twist, I’ll get a couple of paragraphs out of it. I’ve always been a storyteller – I’ll probably be yacking inside my casket when they slip me into the ground.

So it’s to see the opposite in play. As mentioned in an earlier post, Steve Raiford, a good train buddy of mine, is blogging his way around the world on a cruise. You can read the whole thing HERE – there are a lot of funny bits about ports and passengers and various crazy things he’s come up against. But this entry really caught my eye…

Once back on the ship I decide to do laundry while many of the passengers are still on tours but first I must get a new key, probably # 10. The only other person in the laundry was Rita Rudner, our comedian entertainer for tonight. She just boarded the ship a few days ago, and this is her first trip to the laundry because “her husband needed some clean clothes”. I help her with the process, a delightful person.

I read this and my eyes popped out. I even sent him an email, asking, simply, “The” Rita Rudner? And he responded “The” Rita Rudner. Really? I’m left wondering what she was wearing (she’s always so classy on stage) and what she said and how she is in person. I’d have written a novella – every word, every smile, every breath. But Steve, he’s succinct, a man of few words. In later blogs, he mentions one or two factoids about her, things she said to him during their cruise (What? Where? When?). Steve’s too classy a guy to force Ms. Rudner into a selfie but I sure would have liked to hear more about their encounters.

And that’s okay. The turnout track on the sectional layout in the Folkston Jct will need work and we’ve been saving it for him. Usually we all pick an off-trainclub-night to get things done. I’m sure he’ll have some interesting stories to tell.

He’d better, goddammit.

>>>WANT TO SEE ME TURN A SIMPLE “ACCIDETNAL TIME TRAVELER” IDEA INTO A FULL NOVEL? CHECK OUT EARLY RETYREMENT, AS WELL AS MY OTHER BOOKS, HERE!<<<