When you are engulfed in flames - By David Sedaris Page 0,15

I sat together on the front porch. It had just begun to rain when she turned, and asked, “Did I ever tell you about my daddy?”

This was more than I’d ever heard her say, and before continuing she took off her shoes and socks and set them on the floor beside her. Then she drew a hank of hair into her mouth and told me that her father had died of a heart attack. “Said he didn’t feel well, and an hour later he just plunked over.”

I asked a few follow-up questions and learned that he had died on November 19, 1963. Three days after that, the funeral was held, and while riding from the church to the cemetery Ava looked out the window and noticed that everyone she passed was crying. “Old people, college students, even the colored men at the gas station — the soul brothers, or whatever we’re supposed to call them now.”

It was such an outmoded term, I just had to use it myself. “How did the soul brothers know your father?”

“That’s just it,” she said. “No one told us until after the burial that Kennedy had been shot. It happened when we were in the church, so that’s what everyone was so upset about. The president, not my father.”

She then put her socks back on and walked into the parlor, leaving both me and her shoes behind.

When I’d tell people about this later, they’d say, “Oh, come on,” because it was all too much, really. An arthritic psychic, a ramshackle house, and either two or four crazy people, depending on your tolerance for hats. Harder to swallow is that each of us was such a cliché. It was as if you’d taken a Carson McCullers novel, mixed it with a Tennessee Williams play, and dumped all the sets and characters into a single box. I didn’t add that Sister Sykes used to own a squirrel monkey, as it only amounted to overkill. Even the outside world seems suspect here: the leafy college town, the restaurant with its classical music.

I never presumed that Kennedy’s death was responsible for Ava’s breakdown. Plenty of people endure startling coincidences with no lasting aftereffects, so I imagine her troubles started years earlier. As for Chaz, I later learned that it was fairly common for schizophrenics to go off their medication. I’d think it strange that the boardinghouse attracted both him and me, but that’s what cheap places do — draw in people with no money. An apartment of my own was unthinkable at that time of my life, and even if I’d found an affordable one it wouldn’t have satisfied my fundamental need to live in a communal past, or what I imagined the past to be like: a world full of antiques. What I could never fathom, and still can’t, really, is that at one point all those things were new. The wheezing Victrola, the hulking davenport — how were they any different from the eight-track tape player or my parents’ Scandinavian dining room set? Given enough time, I guess anything can look good. All it has to do is survive.

Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie?

When my older sister and I were young, our mother used to pick out our school clothes and hang them on our doorknobs before we went to bed. “How’s that?” she’d ask, and we’d marvel at these stain-free, empty versions of ourselves. There’s no denying that children were better dressed back then: no cutoffs, no T-shirts, and velveteen for everybody. The boys looked like effeminate homosexuals, and the girls like Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? It was only at Halloween that we were allowed to choose our own outfits. One year I went as a pirate, but from then on I was always a hobo. It’s a word you don’t often hear anymore. Along with “tramp,” it’s been replaced by “homeless person,” which isn’t the same thing. Unlike someone who was evicted or lost his house in a fire, the hobo roughed it by choice. Being at liberty, unencumbered by bills and mortgages, better suited his drinking schedule, and so he found shelter wherever he could, never a bum, but something much less threatening, a figure of merriment, almost.

None of this had anything to do with my choice of Halloween costume. I went as a hobo because it was easy: a charcoal beard smudged on the cheeks, pants with holes in them, a hat, an oversized shirt, and a sport