My job requires that I occasionally interact with so-called "customers."  Most of these people are not memorable to me, they are just someone else with a question or a complaint.  The most interesting people I encounter are elderly widows.

How do I know they are widows?  Because they usually manage to mention it during our brief conversations.  These are older ladies who have lost their husbands, their contact with other people seems to have been cut back quite a bit, and they are happy to have a stranger to talk to for a minute or two.

---

There was one house at which the handheld I carry when meter-reading beeped and gave me a "vicious dog" warning.  I could see into the back yard, and it looked like a dog should have been in there, but there didn't appear to actually be a dog.  So I knocked on the door.

My knock was answered by a little old lady.  I told her who I was and asked her if she really had a dangerous dog in her back yard.  Her eyes darted from side to side, as if she were looking for spies or something, and then she even partially covered her mouth with her hand.  In a loud whisper, she said, "It's dead."

Her behavior was very funny, letting me in on her secret while taking such measures to ensure that no one else heard it.  There was no one else nearby who could have heard it.  But I retained my composure as she let me into her back yard and told me the whole story.

She had had a big, vicious dog back there, she said.  Her husband was the only person who could handle it.  But he had passed away a few months ago, and she couldn't even go into her own back yard without getting attacked.  She had been forced to call the animal control people to have it put down.  They had told her to leave her "beware of dog" signs up as a security precaution even if she didn't have a dog.

"So, don't tell anybody I don't have it, anymore," she ended.

"I won't ma'am."

---

Another little old lady I ran into once reminded me of my grandmother, even though she was black and I'm not.  She was barely five feet tall, as thin and straight as a match stick, and she followed me around her yard cracking jokes while I read her meters.  At some point I made some reply that she also thought was funny, and she slapped me on the arm just like my grandmother used to do.  It nearly brought tears to my eyes.

---

One day I was working in a very bad neighborhood where packs of dogs roam loose in the streets and bedevil anyone unfortunate enough to walk through their territory.  These are the kind of dogs that are chicken**** and only attack from behind, so I had been spending a lot of time walking backwards and turning in circles.  The day had begun as most days, with me thinking "I'll just be careful and try to avoid them."  This attitude doesn't last long, however.  I had already passed up my level of tolerance hours before, and was now at the point where I was just wishing one of them would get close enough to me and move slowly enough that I could seriously hurt it.

As I worked my way down one street, zipping into yards and back out again as fast as I could go, I noticed an old lady coming down the other side of the street toward me, being hounded by a pack of about a half dozen small- to medium-sized dogs.

"Do you need help, ma'am?" I shouted over their noise.

She didn't say anything, but she looked up at me and the expression of fear and pleading in her eyes filled me with rage.  I charged into the pack, kicking and hitting with my dog stick.  The dog stick is actually a defensive tool and not an offensive weapon, but I was hitting with it anyway.  As with most of these kinds of loose dogs, as soon as someone actually put the fight to them, they scattered.  I was able to get in only a couple of glancing blows here and there before they were gone.

"Thank you."  Her voice was ancient and as brittle as the pages of an antique book turning.

I asked her if she would be okay from there, and it turned out that "thank you" was about the full extent of her English.  My Spanish is lousy too, but from what she said, it seemed that she was saying she didn't have much farther to go and would be okay.  I kept an eye on her as I went on my way.  When she got to the end of the block, she went inside a house, so she made it there okay.  I don't know if she had to walk back again later or not.

When I got to the end of that street I had to turn around and go back down the other side, the same way the lady had been walking.  I found an empty beer bottle and stuck it in my back pocket, and picked up a hefty rock to carry so I'd have some throwing ammo in case the dogs came back.  Only one of them had the guts to show up again, and it was sure to keep its distance.  I threw the beer bottle and the rock at it anyway, just for fun, but both missed.

---

One hot summer midafternoon I got to one little old lady's house and she saw me coming.  I yelled "meter reader" and she yelled back to go on in.  As I came back from her back yard, she came out of her house with a bottle of beer in one hand and a bottle of water in the other.  She asked me if I wanted a cold drink and offered me the choice of either.

I accepted the water and thanked her for it, and drank it in the shade of her carport while she helped herself to the beer.  For the next few minutes she expounded upon her philosophy of life, the universe, and everything.  I was amazed that she could simultaneously talk and drink beer, somehow without ever pausing to breathe.  I don't remember it all, but I remember that as she finally ran out of wind she finished up with, "But you know what Solomon said."  She paused.  "Or do you?"

"All things are vanity under the sun," I quoted.

That impressed the heck out of her.

---

One day I came to a house where I couldn't get into or even see the back yard, where both meters were.  So I knocked again.  This little old lady was not really that old, mid-sixties I'd guess, and had a very light German accent that echoed of numerous great-aunts and great-uncles I had known while growing up.  The kind of accent someone gets from parents who were native speakers of German.  She said she'd have to open the garage for me to get to her back yard, and she went back inside for a moment to get the door opener.

In her driveway was some recent-model car, the kind of car one might expect an older lady to drive.  Nothing remarkable.  But as she hit the button and her garage door cranked up, my jaw dropped.

I am not a car person.  To me, an automobile is just a way to get somewhere.  Old cars interest me a little, but I'm much more interested in old guns, old books, old records, old photographs, even old currency and old stamps interest me more than old cars.  But this time, even I knew I was seeing something special.

Inside her garage was a Mustang, as green as the inside of a lime and as shiny as if it had just been driven off the showroom floor.  This was a real Mustang, old enough to have remembered Woodstock and Vietnam, if cars had memories.  I just said, "Wow."

"I bought that car when I was just a girl," she said.  "But then I got married and I decided that a married woman should drive a more sensible kind of car.  So I just put it away and kept it.  Now I'm an old widow lady with a 40-year-old Mustang that only has 20,000 miles on it."

I asked her if it still ran okay.  "Oh, sure," she said.  "I take it out and drive it around the block sometimes, just for fun."

I told her I had never seen a Mustang that old that looked that good.  "I know I could get some good money for it," she said.  "But I just can't sell it."

I thanked her for showing me her car before I went on my way.

Another good one at Wondermark.

Wondermark is fast becoming my favorite online comic.