Seen any unidentified flying objects lately?Yeah, me neither, but yesterday there was a free talk on the topic of UFOs and UFO kooks, and the guy talking was Steve Edmiston, who made The Maury Island Incident, about people seeing stuff high in the sky that probably wasn’t there, but who knows?

I’m skeptical about visitors from another world, but the combination of spacemen and free and a pretty good moviemaker meant that I’d be there for the lecture. I’d been looking forward to it for a month.

Sadly, Metro Transit overruled me. A bus being 5 or 10 minutes late (or early) is fairly common, so last thing before leaving the house and walking to the bus stop, I always check the GPS real-time arrivals. It said my bus was 28 minutes late. That means I’d miss my connecting bus, and walk into the lecture about twenty minutes after it started. The bus giveth, and the bus taketh away.

Remaining in my recliner for the rest of the afternoon would’ve doubled the disappointment, so at random I decided on a visit to Volunteer Park, where I’d sometimes tossed a frisbee with friends forty years ago.

Instead of busing south to the flying saucers, I bused north to downtown. Stepping off on Fentanyl Alley, a/k/a 3rd & Pine, getting to the trains requires half a block’s walk through the bums to the entrance, and then about two blocks of underground walking, down littered stairs and piss-drenched walkways.

At what’s called “the mezzanine” (a fancy word for nothing fancy, it only means you’re halfway to the platform) — what was that? I paused and listened.

A cat was meowing, very loudly. In the subway? Up and down and all over I looked, as there came more meowing. If you know cats you can translate the sound, and these were the meows of a frightened and worried cat, and dang it was loud.

I couldn’t see it, but kept looking for the source of the meows. Maybe my good deed for the month would be rescuing a cat that was somehow stranded in the rafters at the subway station. But even more odd than a cat in the subway, its meows remained at the same volume, despite me walking twenty steps in three directions, trying to triangulate.

A woman walked by, stopped and looked confused like me. When we made eye contact, I shrugged, meaning, Nope, I don’t see a cat either.

Well, Volunteer Park won’t wait all day, so giving up on Good Samaritanism, I walked toward the escalators down. And still, the cat’s meowing followed me, still very loudly.

It had to be a prank, I figured. Someone must be pumping a cat’s meow over the public address system, because the sound of meows grew neither softer nor louder as I walked. Riding the escalator down, the sound of the meows rode with me.

At the platform, a security guard was doing nothing, which is what they usually do, so I asked him, “Where’s the cat?”

I expected he’d tell me that someone’s hacked the PA system, or they’re filming a commercial for Purina, something/anything that might make the meows make sense. Instead he said, “Right there,” and pointed at a man standing on the platform, with a pet carrier in his arms.

Inside the carrier was a cat, and inside the cat was an endless supply of very loud meows. One emerged loudly at that moment, and this was the cat I’d heard. Science is some crazy shit, and somehow the subway station’s cavernous acoustics had carried the cat’s meows a hundred feet to the mezzanine.

I laughed and summed up these several paragraphs to the guard, but he eyed me like he’d need to handcuff and haul me away, so I stopped talking. Certainly I said nothing to the man holding the cat. He had crazy eyes.

Me and Crazy Eyes stepped onto the train when it finally came, and the cat’s meows were lost in 80 decibels of our mechanical screeching ride to Capitol Hill, where I got off, hiked an acre of stairs and walkways to the street, and caught the #10 bus to Volunteer Park.

With grass, trees, paths, and picnic tables, the park was exactly as I’d left it in the early 1980s. Hadn’t expected much change, but there was no change at all, except that I was alone.

Forty years ago I’d climbed to the top of the water tower with my girlfriend, kissed her and copped a feel overlooking the city. Eventually, of course, she wised up and dumped me. Then I moved away and my whole life happened, even a wife happened, and then the wife died, and now I’m alone all the time.

I thought about climbing the water tower alone. It’s 107 steps, though, and even three steps onto the bus leaves me short of breath. So all I did at the park was pee in the bushes, then walk to a bench, where I sat and read a book until it bored me.

And it didn’t take long. The book was overwritten, with meandering prose. With only about 50 pages read, tomorrow it goes back to the library.

What’s the book? Yeah, I thought you’d ask, but I’m not saying. It’s one of the classics, and I don’t want to be the barely-published writer who bad-mouths The Literary Greats.

When the skies started sprinkling, I closed the crappy classic and stashed it in my backpack. On the ride home I wondered whatever happened to that pretty woman who’d been with me the last time I’d been at Volunteer Park, and wondered whether she ever wonders about me.

8/22/2024   

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