STEVE MARTIN OF THE BIKE PATH

I told you about the man in probably his late 40’s or early 50’s who looks a lot like Steve Martin of the TV program years ago, “Laugh In”.  White/silver hair and face, body type and all.  He was known as Rowan and Martin at that time.  Well, last night on my walk, I met up with him again walking two of his three dogs.  This man has his Ph.d. in Physics.  He taught college, but now with the way the world is, has been out of work for about a year.  His unemployment insurance will be up shortly and has been making it by living on his savings, unemployment insurance and he has a small part time job.  I don’t know what the job is, but I’m assuming it has nothing to do with teaching.

I was going back home on the bike path and he was walking in the opposite direction.  We both smiled at each other in passing and as I was walking passed him, I made a comment like, “Long time no see.”  We continued passing each other and I wondered if I should have stopped and talked to him, but he didn’t stop or hesitate to stop, so we both kept walking in our opposite directions.  I wondered if he ever found a job and started thinking about why he didn’t stop to talk since we hadn’t seen each other in a long time, but I figured maybe he didn’t want to get into his being out of work.  Maybe he thought I was too nosey, but I think I know my limits socially as to how far to inquire about one’s personal life.  So I just kept walking.

When we were probably 50-100 feet apart, I heard his voice hollering something.  I turned slightly around so I wouldn’t seem to forward as to maybe he would want to talk, and low and behold, he was turned around with his dogs walking towards me.  I still didn’t know if he was hollering at his dogs or hollering to me.  Should I wait for him or if he was just wanting to head back to his car or wanted to talk to me after all?  Maybe he too was thinking we should stop and talk to one another. 

As he was fumbling with the two leashes he had hooked together, he looked up just as I turned slightly and looked up and smiled at me and started walking towards me.

He walked back to me  and in the direction I was going, talking about that sad subject, “Did you get a job?”  I really was hesitant to ask him that, but I thought I should.  Maybe he needed to talk about it.  He said he was offered a job and proceeded to tell me this funny story.

As he was sending out many of his resumes on the internet, he got a reply from a lady who wanted to hire him as a teacher.  They kept corresponding on the internet talking mostly about the job and its duties.  The person, he thought, was from back East.  Come to find out, this job was, in of all places, Guam!  LOL.  He thought seriously of taking the job…for a year.  It would pay $37,000 per year.  In Guam, that would be like a millionaire.  Of course, there’s no place to spend your money there.  It’s a small island.  He would have had to quarantine his three dogs for a year, rent his house out, pay his expenses to get there.  But the lady he was corresponding with said she wanted someone longer than that.  So much for that small hope.

He kept talking about his animals and I picked up with stories I’ve heard about people on bike paths getting killed by the homeless and Mountain Lions and going back to Southern California to list and sell my ranch.  As we approached my exit of the bike path, I stopped and told him this was my exit to my way home thinking he’d just continue on walking, but he didn’t.  We continued talking for at least another half hour.  The dogs finally laying down in the grass as we continued our enjoyable conversation.

He seems to know many people on the bike path because as we were talking for quite some time, people made specific comments about his dogs and he made some specific comments to them.  He only goes, I believe, at evening time to walk and has to drive his car and dogs to the bike path.  One time he told me he lived four miles away.  I’ve figured that he must park at the bus station because he turned around in my direction to head back to his car and after I said I had to go because it was getting dark, he headed back in the same direction of the bus station.

After arriving home, I thought about that funny story and still, this morning, gives me a laugh.