Liz walked down the aisle in thigh high white leather boots and no one who knew her was even a little bit surprised. She kept a rat and loved a Dave and had a laugh like someone else's breaking dishes.
Jason has a head so hard his mother broke her hand in the attempt to smack him on it. A "can do" person in a "can't do family" he made no complaints, just counted the days until his eighteenth birthday.
Pete is an artist whose skill level was stunted by drug overuse at the brilliant high school student stage, and has never progressed further. A very sweet guy whose mind is sharp but experiences regular and consistent delays in processing.
Fred will do the wrong thing before he'll do anything that might ruffle a feather or two. Customers love him. Unreasonable requests, if they doesn't defy the laws of physics, are more likely to get granted than him saying "No."
Karen has a tendency to swoop in just long enough to create a flurry of papers, pens, pencils, and workflows flying and then to swoop away in the night to another foreign getaway before the apoplexy has time to abate.
Carol had one thing that made her happier than bitching about how things ought to be: inciting others to bitch about how things ought to be. Worth a lot as an employee, but, ultimately more trouble than she was worth.
Mark was as skinny as skinny gets. Once day as he climbed into my car for his ride to work and said, "Well?? Do you notice anything different?" I said, "Uh, no, why?" He said, "I started lifting weights yesterday!"
Holly is a nut, but she's the best kind of nut, the child-mind sort who doesn't waste time subverting conventions, she simply ignores them. How else could you see punctuation as soap bubbles, party poppers, and blowout whistles? Whee!
Eric listens to country music all day long and wonders out loud why they play so many songs that mention Hank Williams but don't ever play any music actually by Hank Williams. An intensely determined programmer, hockey player, and father.
Marsha followed a family out to their car to give them back the small change they'd left. They said, "Oh no, that's your tip." She handed it back and said, "Then here, you obviously need this more than I do."
Cleve never has a conversation he hasn't already calculated all possible paths it might go down. It's a thing of beauty to witness the inexorable way those conversations always, fast or slow, go the way he wants them to go.
Elaine never quite made it out of the 1950s, in my imagination. She keeps her house, and her home, immaculate, and is a woman an Air Force Colonel could be proud to call his wife, the Marx Brothers their sister.
Tom lived one block over and was several years older. He and his whole group of friends helped build my soap box derby car, and I never found out why. We hadn't been friends before, and drifted apart soon after.
Larry was the first person I ever trusted too far. When we kicked him out it didn't matter how much he owed us, we wanted him gone. A teen father who stayed up nights on BBSs through hijacked phone lines.
Mark has a stone Victorian mansion. A downtown building was being torn down. Same year, same stone, same quarry — weathered identically. He demolished it for them, for free, numbered the stones for optimal re-assembly, and built an “original” addition.
Bert woke up every morning of college to Aldo Nova's "Fantasy". Every. Single. Morning. Psych 101 warned us that things learned while drunk aren't recalled when sober. So he made sure to both study and take tests drunk. Rhodes Scholar.
Brad has no butt. Really. In fact, he has less than no butt, he has negative butt. He's the only person I've ever seen who actually has a concave backside. We have no idea how he keeps his pants on.
Margarette has never recommended a bad book, and most of her suggestions end up being books I buy several times because I keep loaning out my copy and never getting it back because it gets loaned out by the loanee.
Bill was dating my girlfriend's mother and took us with to test drive a plane he wanted to buy. When we were finished he got out his checkbook. No checks. So he bought it with his American Express Ebony card.
Jenny was a gradeschool classmate and the person I thought was the most "normal" and "well-adjusted" (whatever those mean). I have no idea if that impression was (or remains) accurate, but some days it helps me to imagine both.
Joe bragged about owning a commercial dairy route: lady gets pissed at your driving, you call her a crazy bitch, she calls the number on the truck to complain, you say the "driver"'s right, she is a crazy bitch.
Barb is one of several accountants I know that are of a single type: overworked, underpaid, constantly buried under an interconnected snarl of details that only they can resolve, and despite all of that, as mistake-free as humans get.
Keith was my best friend's brother, the first person I knew to go to jail. One day we were playing tennis, the next he was gone. Two years later he was back long enough to rob his parents and disappear.
Dotty replaced the guy who'd been vodka drinking on the job for fifteen years. She lasted seven months. Blame the strong and unmistakable scent of gin on her breath. If you must drink on the job, people, don't drink gin.
Siri came to America on soccer scholarship and made the tennis team three days after he first tried it. When his first opponent made the excuse of "only been playing for five years". Siri laughed, "I only play five days!"
Dave is a force of Nature who has fire damaged more than one of my residences (using things like cereal) and is often heard to say, "Sorry, that was louder than I intended." Of course, he also saved my life.
Joseph told a golfer who complained when he wasn't allowed to smoke a cigar in the same clubhouse where he bought it, "We sell condoms in the men's room, and ask that you not use those in there, as well."
Paul had the genius to improvise a drunken, perfect rendition of "Skull Fuck Blues" the year he toured with the European Allstar Opera. We liked each other instantly and still, though we've never had time together to find out why.
Genevive is an artist who hasn't located her area of interest yet. She emerges clean, fresh, business casual steamed and pressed from a battered, lived-in-looking used car that's as much a mess as she appears not to be.
John has his argumentative points all worked out in advance to such a high degree he can't deviate from his airtight plan of attack. Even if all the information he's basing his argument on is out of date. Details, details.