I Was a Travelling Door to Door Encyclopedia Salesman

As I've indicated before, most travelling door to door encyclopedia salesmen (silently) quit after their first road trip, never to be seen again (by us, that is, and what else matters?).  There were a lot of these one-trippers in my six months "inside", and most have been forgotten to the mists of time. The only one my mind occasionally still turns to is the one who I always thought of as Steven Seagal, to the extent that that's the only name I have for him today.  He was a very serious young man in his early 20s.  Steven felt like he was living life as the hero in a Bruce Lee movie.  He was a black belt in karate (a fact nobody could know him for 5 minutes without learning).  He was a pacifist; all he wanted was to live a quiet dignified life and bring love an harmony to everyone, but dammit people kept making him fight! Every story from him was the same.  Yadda yadda peace hope love, yadda yadda coupla dicks wanting to start trouble, yadda y...

So there we were in the frozen Great White North, and Ann Nilsson didn't have a hat.  The weather was -20 or -30 and windy.  She was either too cheap or too broke to buy one, so she suffered. One night, our "territories" in town were adjacent to each other's, and after a fun-filled evening knocking on strangers' doors and trying to sell them encyclopedias, Ann and I met up to walk together back to the motel.  As we were walking, I spied a plain black  touque lying in a snow bank.  I pointed it out to Ann and she picked it up, dusted off the snow, and put it on.  Some folks look good in anything, and Ann was one such person. I began to have the stirrings of inspiration.  "Ann, what do you think we should tell the guys about how we got it?"  Ann wasn't really sure what I meant.  This was not an uncommon occurrence. Let us pause this exciting and suspense-filled tale to point out that John Schlesinger was with us on this particular...