Once upon a time there was a small boy.
Jimmy couldn't go to school because his sister and brother had chicken pox.So Jimmy stayed home for the whole of the last half of August that year.
Jimmy, in finding useful activities while he was stranded at home had occasion to cover drive his cricket ball on to the garage roof where it lodged in the gutter. He got a bit angry and as he went to get the ladder, he tripped on his brother's bicycle which lay across the open door of the garage.
Jimmy skun his knee.It bled.
After letting out a sharp cry,Jimmy got up and headed toward the kitchen door.Just as he got there the doctor arrived to see the patients. 'Quite a graze! said Doc Harmer,'Here.let me dress that'
With his newly dressed knee Jimmy got the ladder and retrieved the ball.
On his way out Dr Harmer commented on Jimmy's straight bat in the very real game in which Jimmy was demoralising the English Test side up against the garage wall. 'Your brother and sister can go back to school tomorrow'. Jimmy thought, so can I.
Problems solved! All the problems that Jimmy had seemed to be finding solutions.
Problems are not so bad because you can solve them.
Something worried Jimmy though. When he was on the garage roof retrieving the cricket ball he had noticed something odd in the backyard of the next door neighbour.The. neighbour,Jones,was painting his window panes.With red paint.And he was using the cat as a brush. This troubled Jimmy. And the cat did not look well. Jimmy knew he would have to do something.
Perhaps he could talk to Mr Jones.
No, Mr Jones was fully an adult with children of his own.How could a young schoolboy expect to change Jones' behaviour?
I could speak to my brother and sister about it, he thought. No, they wouldn't believe him and even if they did they wouldn't want to confront a fully grown adult about the strangest of strange behaviour.
The cat screeched and ran across the yard, flew across the fence to a spray of red dots and slinked up a drainpipe on to the garage roof.
There it sat, panting,painted,red and bewildered.
Jones didn't seem to notice the cat was missing as he dipped his car seat covers which had been recently washed and were drying on the clothes line, into the red paint as he continued to block out all the light from the house with red paint.
Jimmy was desperate. He worked out he could save the cat by bathing it.He could ask Mrs Jones if she needed help in scraping the red paint off the window panes. But how to deal with Mr Jones?
Mr Jones, you seem to painting the window panes with red paint, and you have positively ruined the cat' or something to that effect.
But somehow Jimmy knew that to engage in polite logical conversation with someone like Jones may not only be ineffectual but positively dangerous.
So he could do nothing but watch.
In time Jones ran out of paint but not before he had painted 16 windows and three doors,one meter box and five trees with red paint, a cat,seat covers,pillow cases and towels from the clothes line and his Nike baseball cap.
There was a muffled sound of a female voice coming from the laundry where it turned out Mrs Jones was tied to the washing machine with a vacuum cleaner cord and was wearing a gag that looked like red stockings.
What made Jones do these weird and destructive things?
The police arrived as Jimmy wondered how the problem could be solved and not just interrupted and delayed.When and how would it erupt next?
The police used force against Jones. Jimmy knew he'd be back.
Jimmy didn't think that logical thinking or persuasion and common sense would have the slightest impact on Jones who fought against the handcuffs that restrained him.
It seemed to Jimmy that all the logic and commonsense that could be mustered up in the whole neighbourhood would not impinge on Jones. It was like he could not hear and understand. And Jimmy suspected that even if he could or had understood that he preferred his destructive course
Oh.... and Jimmy untied Mrs Jones who said thank you; far too casually.
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