The Sign

The Sign

Jack Saunders couldn’t find the darn sign he’d made for the protest. How could that be? Just yesterday he’d toiled with markers and contact paper and wooden slats and Oaktag to make the sign. This morning he was to carry his sign of protest in the back of his car covered by a tarp to the corner. The corner was crucial. He’d not designated the corner. A woman named Nancy Chopin had told them via email she hoped it was satisfactory to everyone. They’d be peacefully protesting at the corner where the entrance and exit to the highway was. They were to be prompt. She wrote she had “announcements.”

              The garage was a mess, but it was his garage, and he knew almost where everything was. He’d moved his car out onto the driveway so he had a better view of everything. He stood amidst the tables of tools, the brooms and mops, three pairs of winter boots, three stools with nothing on them, plant pots stacked neatly and not neatly because some didn’t fit right, fans covered with black plastic bags, four of them. He moved paint cans and looked behind them, thinking perhaps he’d propped his sign with its lonesome pine tree, so carefully drawn, behind the cans. He hadn’t.

              What was going on? He sat on one of the stools he’d bought at an estate sale which was held in the driveway of a cottage. Certainly not an estate. He scratched his head and looked at his wristwatch. There was still time, but not much, a half hour to find his sign. Had he already put it in the backseat of his car. He peered in. No. He opened the trunk. No. This state of affairs was absurd.

              Jack was 66 years old, retired last year from the pharmaceutical firms where he’d given so many years in the office of public relations. He’d worn suits then, suits and white and blue Oxford cloth shirts and red and blue striped ties, black shoes, always black shoes. He thought brown shoes were only worn by the men who didn’t know better. Better than what he’d never explained to himself. All those press releases announcing new drugs for about every ailment of the brain. Now he wondered, this dripping morning, if he had some ailment of the brain. Where was the sign?

              It was April and April was always drippy in his little part of America. He called it drippy because dew in the morning dripped down the windshield of his car when he’d forgotten to put it in the garage at night. Forgotten or hadn’t forgotten. For reasons he didn’t know he sometimes left the car in the driveway. Most of the time he locked it, took the keys inside and placed them on the table by the door.

              No, he wasn’t losing his senses. The keys were on the table. He was dressed in freshly dry -cleaned Khaki pants and a semi-starched long-sleeved shirt, ochre, sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He eschewed short-sleeved shirts as he did brown shoes. Now he wore sneakers the color of his shirt. They’d be pacing up and down with their signs of protest, and Jack wanted his feet prepared for pacing.            Pacing was something he did a lot in the Men’s Room on the 49^th floor of the building where he’d worked on press releases all those decades. He hadn’t always been sure he’d been telling the entire truth about the brain drugs, and he’d felt tinges of guilt in his loins. He’d convinced himself his job was to write press releases and not question the ethics of the hundreds of lab workers who used tweezers to take particles out of one tube and put them into another tube.

              Nowadays he was alleviating that guilt and the guilt of not paying enough attention to his wife Connie while she was dying of kidney failure. He was carrying signs of protest to alert passersby of the shrinking of the aquifer and the dangers of benzine and the high price of lithium. He’d recently bought stock in a lithium mining company and its price had increased twofold in two months. Lithium was the stuff of batteries, and batteries are America’s future. Lithium mining, he’d learned, is arduous and tedious. Some engineer entrepreneur would sure to come up with something better for batteries.

              Jack strode around the outside of his house. He felt sticky as if the morning’s humidity was permeating his pristine shirt and his black socks which he felt weren’t quite right with his ochre sneakers. But time was fleeing or was it fleeting?

              The sign was nowhere where he might have but didn’t prop it up against the tawny shingles. He looked up to the roof, but, of course, he thought the sign would not be there. Certainly not. Yesterday he’d played golf in the gray afternoon with its humidity after he’d finished his sign, his minor, not major, masterpiece, he’d thought, with its two rhyming words he’d carry in the protest.

              Jack did a lot of thinking on the toilet. It was going to be a long morning, so he thought he’d visit the toilet and think where he might have put the darn sign. He sat and relived yesterday and last evening and the remnants of a dream – something about himself with wings. He couldn’t recall any context of why he had wings, but that’s what dreams are made of, like gossamer wings.

              When he was finished and felt he was wandering from the whereabouts of the sign, he got up, adjusted his clothing and went to his car. He called Stan and told him he’d made a fine sign but he forgot where he’d put it, that he’d searched all over and couldn’t find it. Stan assured him there were plenty of signs to go around. Stan said they didn’t expect many protestors because of the humidity.

              “Come on along,” goodhearted Stan said. “I lose things too. Perhaps you left it somewhere.”

              “Perhaps I did.” Jack felt exasperation crawl into his voice. “But I can’t think of where.”

              As if his brain took flight, he remembered where. “I left it in the locker room at the Golf Club. I wanted to show it to you, but you weren’t there. Yep, that’s where I left it. I hope the guys didn’t know it was mine. I don’t think I want them to know what I’m protesting, if you know what I mean, Stan.”

              “As they say these days, no worries. I’ll drop by and get it. Where is it?”

              Jack pictured his sign under a bench in his club’s locker room. Of course, that’s where he’d put it. A slip of the mind with so many things to think about these days – climate change, voter fraud, Cuba, dictatorships, guilt, lithium, wind power, the demise of whatever that species of frogs is, benzine, corporate greed, whatever happened to handkerchiefs and so much more.

              Stan and Jack met at the designated intersection, shook hands and with a kind of triumphant gesture, Stan handed Jack his sign. A pickup came by and the driver spit out the window. A mom with a carload full of soccer-clad girls came by. The mom did a thumbs up. People honked their horns, waved, gave the finger, doffed their caps and someone threw a half-eaten pear at Jack’s new sneakers.

              Jack felt how happy he was to be American.