By Slim Randles

When Windy walked into the Mule Barn during that cold snap last week, we knew he was getting frantic for an audience. He has a hard time getting us to listen to his version of history, his notions of what was going on now, and his prognostications of the future of mankind.

But it was cold, and sitting out on the bench and ambushing listeners didn’t work too well right now for Windy Wilson, so here he came. We gave each other the wink and dragged out a chair for him.

“What d’you know, Windy? Cold enough for ya?”

“Cold? You think this is cold? Why, one time up on the high line, I was disappropriating firewood for the crew on the railroad, and it come over me, then and there …”

“We weren’t talking about the cold this morning, Windy,” said Doc. “We were discussing the future of microbes.”

“Microbes? Ain’t they like choir robes? Why, this one time I was singing barleytone in the Presbytoolian church, and there was this guy named Mike all right, and …”

“Now Doc,” said Steve, twitching his walrus mustache, “Don’t you remember? We’d finished with the microbes and went sailing on into February. Sorry, Windy, Doc didn’t mean to disrupticate your dissemination of events, but he’d just forgot. It was February.”

“February? You mean like Leap Year kinda February paraphernalium where you only get olden on one day every four years? That kinda February?”

Dud and Herb were trying hard not to laugh.

“No, Alphonse,” Doc said. He sometimes got formal with our friend. “We were discussing whether or not to leave out the first r in February. No one uses it …”

“But just because something isn’t used,” Windy said, waving his empty coffee cup at Mavis, “doesn’t mean we have to completely immolify it, does it? If we occasionally sloop over the top of a letter, that doesn’t braggandize it. That doesn’t codify its lesserness, does it?”

“So you’re saying we should keep the first r in February, is that it?” asked Steve.

“Absotively,” said Windy.

“OK, now,” Doc said, “who will stand up for the h in school?”

Some people think we’re just having coffee each morning there in the truck stop.

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