I Was a Travelling Door to Door Encyclopedia Salesman

Sasha asked me to write this one, because he doesn't remember it. Regular readers know me as Mitch Clinton, but you can call me Clint. Back in the fall of '93, I was a travelling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman too, and when Sasha (as we knew him then) joined the crew, I was the one assigned to train him. So if you've enjoyed his stories, some of the blame is mine. Recently I brought up a day from those first few weeks of his, and he drew a complete blank. Not a flicker. So here it is, for the record. We were working a Canadian Forces base in Alberta. Calgary, I’m pretty sure, though thirty-odd years will blur a map. We’d driven our boss John Schertzer’s red VW Jetta onto the base, parked it in the visitors’ lot, and started working the family housing. As you’ll know from Sasha's stories, we were taught to target houses with obvious evidence of children, and base housing was full of them: rows of neat little homes, kids’ bikes on the lawns, the whole picture. A goldm...

I just finished watching Coyote vs. Acme and was inspired to tell a story from back in the days when I was a traveling door-to-door encyclopedia salesman. Our merry little band of misfits was heading out of town (Vancouver) on another quest adventure sales road trip. We were taking the Trans-Canada Highway east toward the interior, probably headed for some small town in Alberta or Saskatchewan, but we were barely out of town, crossing the old Port Mann Bridge into Surrey. As we were in the middle of the bridge, I noticed a strange flutter of movement to my right (I was riding shotgun) and turned my head to see something so odd that in the intervening 32-odd years my mind has on numerous occasions tried to convince me that it never happened, that my brain's wiring somehow got crossed, inserting some half-forgotten cartoon into a real-life memory. But no, this happened. A perfectly round piece of heavy plastic sheeting had somehow ended up on the roadway until a gust of wind lift...