The other night, around midnight, I was driving to work on a deserted stretch of highway when I came upon a cop who had a car pulled over on the side of the road. No big deal. But then about 200 yards beyond that scene, in the middle of I swear to God freakin’ NOWHERE, I mean nothing but swamp and cockroaches, there was a man standing on the side of the road with a grocery cart. Just standing there. At midnight. All alone.
That’s it. That’s all I know. I’ll never hear the end of that story. That happens a lot and it drives me nuts. I mean, I’m sure that there was either a fascinating tale there, or a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I’ll always be left out of that particular loop.
Just as I’ll never know what became of the professional diver who surfaced near my bridge and instantly had his entire face ripped off by a passing speed boat. I know he spent months in the hospital, but after that, the trail goes cold.
And whatever happened to the waste of human flesh who kept my dog for the first year of his life in a horrendous puppy mill where he never saw the outdoors, had to fight 30 other dogs for food, and stood starving up to his chest in waste while breathing ammonia? I mean, does someone like that go on to read Winnie the Pooh to the kiddies while setting aside money for the college fund?
And as I was writing this, I looked up to see a huge cargo ship moving up the St. Johns River. No big surprise there. We get several of them a night, but this one was extremely different in that the vessel’s name was covered up, and it was surrounded by police vessels with flashing blue lights that looked like fire flies attacking a slow moving elephant. I’m assuming this is a contraband case, but again, I’ll never know.
Every day we pass hundreds of people on the street who probably have fascinating anecdotes of which we’ll never be privy. It kind of makes me wonder what I’m missing.
On the other hand, some stories are better left incomplete. For example, my oldest sister decided to look up her first boyfriend from high school and discovered that he’s doing time in prison for serial rape. Apparently after they parted ways he developed a taste for drugging women that he met in bars, and then tied them up with duct tape before doing the deed. That’s a story that could have remained untold. You’ll be proud of me, though. I resisted the urge to tell her that he always did give me the creeps.
Closure can be a double edged sword.
The View from a Drawbridge 
We are all just the middle chapters in a really big book…
The never ending story?
In an historical sense, yes.