I was at Peet's Coffee in Alameda, California this morning, drinking hot chocolate and reading Lord of the Flies. There were three retired guys a couple of tables away, chatting. I overheard the following story:
"He was a lawyer for an intellectual property firm--a big-time litigator. He met this woman and fell in love with her. She wasn't at all interested. She owned a window-washing company. He quit his job and went to work as a window washer so that he could be close to her."
That's as much as I heard, but I would have liked to know what happened next. It's possible that the lawyer's perseverance was rewarded. The window-washer lady came to understand that he loved her so much that he was willing to give up his career to follow her. Eventually, she relented, married him, and together they developed the biggest window-washing company in San Francisco. But then again, perhaps she realized that he wasn't really in love -- in fact, he was one of those obsessive stalkers that regularly appear in horror movies. So she was forced to escape by selling her company, taking a new name, and moving to Pocatello. He continued to wash windows, and started to specialize in eighty-story buildings. One day, he failed to hook his belt properly and fell. No one ever knew if it was an accident or suicide. Meanwhile she was happy in Idaho, where she married a mild-mannered lawyer.
Or --another thought -- he forgot all about her but found that he liked washing windows more than corporate law. But one day, he was hooked outside a skyscraper window, and looked inside and there she was at a meeting. And he fell in love all over again.
February 13: I now think it most likely that he forgot all about the lady, moved to rural Connecticut, changed his name to Seymour Glass, and became a recluse who lived a house with very clean windows.
Comments