Wearing a simple white tee shirt, the right sleeve of which concealed the Chinese dragon and K-bar knife tattoo which served as a testament to the fact that he had once spent a night being a much too drunk young Marine on his first shore leave after rotating back stateside, and a pair of denims which were faded due to ample time spent in the washer and which had several holes caused by wear and tear, David Bader was sitting in front of his laptop, trying to organize the latest pieces of local history that he had managed to compile over the last few weeks. He had a neat pile of information stacked next to his computer on his kitchen table, including an article out of a 1956 issue of the local newspaper about President Eisenhower passing through the city during his campaigning that year.
But while the article was a nice titbit, particularly since Eisenhower was one of David’s favourite presidents; he would have voted for him over any Democratic candidate other than Stevenson that year, or any candidate in the last election, for that matter, it wasn’t really the sort of thing which made for properly good local history or microhistory. Instead, what David was particularly excited about was the old journal that he had gotten his hands on a few days ago, being given it by an acquaintance who knew about his hobby. Having yet to read it, David was very much looking forward to doing so.
A few minutes earlier, the six feet and a couple of inches tall blonde man had received a call from Kathryn Carlson, his colleague at Hope’s local high school, in which she had informed him that a get-together was planned that evening to celebrate Courtney Jones’ eighteenth birthday and that he was invited to it.
David liked Courtney, he considered her to be one of the best and brightest students that he had had so far during his few years as a teacher, even if he did think that she was a bit too much of a natural scientist and was therefore incapable of understanding at times that there wasn’t one objective truth to any historical event which was simply waiting to be revealed. Capable of being quite stubborn at times, Courtney had persevered in her misconceptions despite David’s best efforts to convince her that things were most often a lot more complex than she thought them to be.
Still, she had managed to avoid getting involved with that oaf Chad, who David thought was similar to the air force chief of Nazi Germany in more than just his surname.
David liked Kathryn as well, considering her to be not merely a colleague but a dear friend, and the only fly in the ointment was her recurring attempts to pair him up with one of her girlfriends. He knew that she was only trying to be nice, but her efforts to meddle in his love life did nonetheless serve to trigger his deep-seethed repulsion to the thought that someone else was trying to determine how and with whom he should spend his life. It was the same instinct that had driven him to drink too much and do too many stupid things during his high school years, throwing away his chances to attain a college scholarship in the process. Not being particularly proud of or pleased with that part of his personality, David had done his best to suggest to Kathryn that she would be better off trying her hand at more subtle ways of pairing him up with one of her friends.
Thinking of Kathryn caused David to recall that he hadn’t gotten any information as to whether or not he was supposed to buy the birthday girl a present, and he considered calling her to ask about it. But she had sounded as though she was quite busy, so perhaps it was best to wait a while.
[Contains writer's notes] |