Swimming with Bears Meeah Williams
I swore I wouldn't try to deal with this sort of thing myself anymore,
that I would call the police, or animal control, or someone, but I found
myself sliding open the patio door and approaching the pool, which was empty
this time of year, the tarp having blown off, which was why I had gone out
to the pool in the first place, to secure it, and that's when I saw it,
there at the bottom of the deep end, a bear dressed in a man's clothes, with
a knapsack beside him, smoking a pipe, and when he saw me he didn't seem the
least bit surprised and when you think of it why should he have been
surprised since I was a man as a man was supposed to be and he was the
anomaly, and at first I thought the most logical thing I could think under
the circumstances which was that the bear had killed a man, stolen and
dressed himself in the murdered man's clothes, but once the bear started
speaking I discounted the idea that I was encountering a man-killer because
this bear seemed so reasonable, so soft-spoken, which is, I suppose, why I
ended up making it a sandwich—tuna salad on lightly toasted white bread—and
carried it back out to the pool along with a thermos of black coffee and, in
my pocket, a couple of Chips Ahoy! chocolate chip cookies wrapped in a
napkin, and, descending the stairs at the shallow end, I walked in my
slippers across the concrete bottom of the empty pool and offered this
modest meal to the bear who thanked me with great gentility, and I sat across
from him cross-legged in my pajamas and robe and kept him company while he
ate, and afterwards, his pipe packed with a fresh bowl of tobacco, we talked
of many things and discovered we had quite a bit in common, our love of
baseball, for instance, and I felt so comfortable with him by then that I
ventured a small joke about being surprised that he wasn't a Cubs fan, and if
I was worried he might take this the wrong way, as some kind of slur or
put-down, my apprehension didn't last long because the bear merely laughed,
a low soft rumbling in his massive hirsute chest that made me feel good all
over, and his pipe tobacco smelled wonderful, like the dark earth in a very
fertile forest, and his pipe's smoke curled towards the stars like a ghostly
rope leading up to a better world, and I hid my smile in my sleeve and I
couldn't help but think what a wonderful rug that bear would
make. >>>NEXT >>>
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