Dragons
Tuesday, March 31st, 2009
Tom Green lived in our town, and hung out at the feed store where I worked. He was a big man with a quick grin and a quiet voice. Most folks were attracted to him. It felt comfortable being around him. It was said in his youth he had traveled and worked all over the world at all kinds of occupations. He followed the oil field crowd from west Texas to Venezuela and on to the Philippines. He worked as an Archeologist in China’s Gobi desert as well as in the shadows of the pyramids of Egypt. Some stories hinted he had served as a French soldier in North Africa. Few in our town had been far from the county line, and especially me.
One day I summoned up enough courage to ask him a question. “Mr. Green, what was the most exciting adventure you remember?”
Tom leaned his rawhide-bottomed chair against the feed store wall and sat quietly staring at the ceiling. I was afraid he hadn’t heard me and was about to repeat my question. “Well it may have been the time I almost saved a young damsel in distress from the ravages of a Dragon,” he said.
Don’t you know this statement got my full attention? I stood closer, not to miss a single word he said.
“I was living in Houston at the time and got an anxious call from a niece of mine,” he said. “She had grown up in west Texas and had just moved to a little village in the country. Her excited voice on the phone told me she had a problem. She said there was a Dragon in her back yard that had eaten her cat and was now chasing her dog around the fenced yard. I grabbed my gun and a rope, jumped into my pick-up and raced the few miles to her home. In my haste I was driving a little fast. A police car, with lights flashing, pulled me over. He gave me a ticket for speeding, and going the wrong way on a one-way street. The Cop asked me what my hurry was? I answered that I was going to capture a Dragon that was threatening my niece. He pulled me from the truck and made me walk the centerline of the street. Convinced I was not drunk, he let me go. My niece met me at the door almost in tears. She said as her dog was making the fifth run around the yard, ahead of the dragon, she opened the door, let the dog in, and slammed the it shut just as the Dragon hit the screen, tearing it to pieces. I peeked out the window. I did not see any fire and smoke billowing from a Dragon’s nose or mouth as I had expected. In fact I couldn’t see a Dragon. What I did see, lying flat in the grass in the middle of the yard was a five-foot long alligator. I thought about teasing her for thinking an alligator was a fire breathing; smoke blowing Dragon, but considering she was from west Texas I thought perhaps I should let lying Dragons lay. I roped the ‘gator’, and with the help of a neighbor dragged the ‘monster’ back to the nearby bayou. On the way back to my niece’s house, we found her cat, high in a tree, safe and unscorched.”
All these years since that tale was told to me I have wondered about its veracity. However, now that I am his age, as he was then, I wonder what I would tell a freckle faced, tow headed little boy should he ask me, “What is the most exciting adventure you have had?”