My Pagoda Pal

Sometimes on a Saturday evening, to briefly bail from the week’s hurly-burly, I ride my cool blue bike to the cool white pavilion on the quaintly-named Shellbay Avenue about a half-mile out into the wetlands.

The pavilion has a pagoda roof and a crabbing dock extends perhaps 150 feet out into the bay. I think the pagoda shape is apropos for this setting, where a natural stillness overlays gull cries and water sounds. The waterscape is phenomenal, 180 complete degrees of sky and water and swaying marsh grasses, a palette complete in itself, yet shifting with the vagaries of wind and clouds. It’s always new with a touch of the eternal.

So there I was, yesterday evening, sitting at the table under the pagoda roof, listening to what was to me a symphony of the squeals and shouts and laughs and sounds of simple pleasure coming from the bunch of little Hispanic and Asian kids who darted and whizzed on and off the pier while their parents and older siblings happily crabbed and gossiped. The random mosaic of their voices had an absorbing quality, like a Bach cantata, and I was so totally gathered into that moment that   it took a while for me notice the man at the end of the table.

He was sitting on a very expensive racing bicycle, wearing a very expensive helmet and very expensive racing shorts and shirt that were made from a silkish material that was obviously spun on Mars. He was in his early forties, handsome in an assured, corrupt way, and with a physique that didn’t make the bike outfit look silly.

“Mind if I sit?” he asked as he sat. “You’re Bob Ingram, aren’t you? I’m John Justice.”

We shook hands and he said he’d seen the documentary on PBS that we made about the Wildwood Boardwalk.

“That was quite a while ago,” I said.

“Sure,” he said. “Heck, we’ve been keeping an eye on you since the old underground press days. Right up to now and that anti-Trump blog you’re doing.”

“Who’s ‘we’ that’s been keeping all these eyes?” I wanted to know.

“You know I can’t tell you that,” he said with a big smile like he’d just told me I’d won Publisher’s Clearing House.

“Anyhow,” he went on, “you see which way it’s going with the press now – enemies of the people, right from the President. And that includes you. And next the press will be called an ‘enemy of the state,’ and that’s when we’ll meet in my official capacity. We will come for you then. I just follow orders.”

“What about my Blog partners?”

“Them too. Tell them that. We will come for them too. You all should think deeply about this while there’s time. ”

Then he hopped on his fancy-ass wheel and pedaled off into the sunset.

My partners and I have indeed thought deeply and our response to you and yours, John Justice, is a loud and resounding “FUCK YOU!!”