One Hundred Ninety-Seven

The world is awash in interesting people.  They’re not all people with whom you’d want to spend a great deal of time, but they’re interesting, nonetheless.  Like the guy in a long, dirty rainbow robe over his clothes; he has a pet goat and speaks of people who have too many things but who won’t offer him a job or a place to sleep.  Or the guy who cooks pizza at a downtown Hot Springs pizzeria; he looks genuinely ecstatic when I say the pizza was excellent. Or the woman whose crazed emotionality causes her to say the same thing, over and over again, using only slightly different words.   Interesting people have a way of finding their way into books, don’t they?