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On the road again:
Greetings from Wilderness Oaks RV Resort in Rockport, Texas, where, last night, Cyndy and I enjoyed a beautiful afternoon and evening outside.
We recently purchased a little collapsible brazier. I lit a fire in it in the afternoon and worked on my current eBooks project.
Then we ate supper outside next to the fire. Then we watched a documentary on my laptop next to the fire. A very warm and pleasant experience.
This RV park is where we also had an experience that left us feeling very, very good. I captured that experience, with humor, in …
Today’s Story
This morning, we disposed of the body. We cut it into little pieces and put some of it here and some of it there, unrecognizable from its original form.
We hatched the plot with Kathy and Albert while eating the weekly Saturday breakfast in the RV park’s community center.
She works in the registration office. He’s the main maintenance man here.
“We bought a new mattress for our trailer and need to dispose of the old one,” I said. “Can we toss it in one of the dumpsters?”
They looked at each other.
“Not in one piece,” Kathy said.
“There’s a twenty-five dollar fine … if you get caught,” added Albert, who went on to relate stories of other large items that he, over the years, has cut into dumpster-agreeable bits.
“Can we pay the twenty-five dollars up front?” I asked.
“It’s better if you cut it up in little pieces and put them in black trash bags,” Kathy persisted. “Put some in each dumpster.”
“I’ve got a utility knife,” Albert said, offering the murder weapon, and I agreed that would incise better than my Swiss Army knife.
We arranged to meet outside our trailer within the hour.
Cyndy and I returned there and approached the victim. We denuded it from its pillows, blankets, sheets, and intimate coverings.
We pulled it from its wooden platform and dragged it outside to a picnic table, where we left it spread eagle, supine.
When Kathy and Albert returned to help dismember the body, she conceived another idea: chair cushions.
The old mattress had no springs, no frame, no metal or wooden components—just one thin layer of pure foam and a body of batting.
“There are chairs in the community center that need new padding,” said Kathy, who is also a quilter.
She went there to take measurements. “Fifteen inches square,” she said upon her return.
Albert and I used his ruler, a four-foot straight edge, and a black Sharpie to mark the lines of dissection.
The mattress was exactly sixty inches by seventy-five inches, perfect to produce twenty pieces.
Then he began to cut the batting, commenting that its fibrous tissue was tough and would soon dull the blade of his knife.
Cyndy went into our trailer and reemerged with a serrated bread knife. She cut while Albert hacked.
I complimented her precision, sawing the knife back and forth while cleaving the foam and leaving some of the black line on both sides of the kerf.
Within thirty minutes, the deed was done. Kathy carted the squares of batting away in her golf cart.
The foam, we left intact so that she could give it to others as a kennel pad for their dog.
A piece of extra foam that Cyndy and I had used atop the old mattress to give it extra thickness … well, we did stuff that into a black plastic bag and trashed it in a dumpster.
Afterward, the four of us celebrated that we had repurposed the body, giving it new life in new resurrected form.
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My work on a series of travel eBooks continues. Yesterday, I finished Volume 16, which is about five places in India:
- Pathankot, where I slept overnight in the railway station;
- Amritsar, where I visited the Sikh Golden Temple and the Hindu Silver Temple;
- Wagah, India’s border crossing with Pakistan, where I witnessed the ceremonial lowering of the two nations’ flags at sunset;
- Delhi, where I connected with acquaintances in the slums and declined an unexpected offer of marriage; and
- Bodh Gaya, where I visited the Bodhi Tree under which the Buddha attained enlightenment.
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Thank you for reading my stories.
Thank you for caring.
God blesses everyone ... no exceptions.
Robert (Bob) Weir
