The Coonridge Digest: Suspicions aroused

Greetings from the Ridge.

We finally asked Pete Monroe to leave town. We had to. What else do you do with a man so suspicious… so weird… an out-and-out outcast?

Our suspicions were first aroused when Pete was the only resident in town who refused to buy a cell phone. I mean he just refused! Pete was even heard to say, "If you want to get hold of me, call me when I’m at home." Imagine the nerve of the guy! The whole town was able to reach each other in the garden, at the store, and driving 70 down the interstate except for poor, dumb old Pete who allowed as how a land line was good enough. He then insulted us all by saying, "I think folks spend too much time on the phone anyway."

This could have been tolerated and simply written off as a mild eccentricity had Pete not taken the second and even more peculiar step of refusing to sign up for the Internet. Imagine that! It is 2009 and no Internet! If Pete was mowing the yard and you couldn’t reach him by cell phone, then email wasn’t even an option. The whole town was put through the misery of having to wait until Pete came home to contact him. The time we wasted! The fretful hours we spent wondering whether he’d join the fellowship committee or guessing whether he’d heard the latest gossip. The man was becoming a hermit before our very eyes!

Pete’s refusal to join the modern world of instant communication and self-adulation was compounded when the entire town began text-messaging each other and we couldn’t even talk to him in abbreviated misspelled words! Rumor has it, and although I can’t confirm this I suspect it’s true, that late at night when the town was peacefully texting each other in bed, Pete was seen sitting at his desk and actually writing letters to his friends in long hand. Long hand! This was like tinkling off the back porch when you had access to perfectly good indoor plumbing!

Of course few folks actually read Pete’s letters because… well… you had to take the time to read them. No colorful smiley-faced icons, no forwards, no attachments – just words and thoughts on the page!

And without text messaging, Pete’s ability to Twitter was non-existent. Four hundred freedom-clutching, liberty-loving residents of our little village giving up chores, responsibilities and a good deal of our livelihoods just so the rest of the world could read our Twitters and see what we had for breakfast, and then there was backward old Pete who somehow thought his privacy was more important than ours! I always liked Pete and figured it was a good thing he left town before somebody shot him.

Facebook and MySpace were of course out of the question for Pete as he continued the maddening habit of keeping his private life private. The nerve! While most of us gave freely to the world by letting everyone know our reaction to everything, sharing the latest pictures of our wives in swimsuits, and liberally sharing our taste in music, TV shows, and tofu with the world, Pete sat there on the lonely end of his block refusing to open his soul to the universe. What did he have to hide?

Hooley Gibbs finally got up the nerve to ask Pete about his peculiar habits one day down at the coffee shop. Pete first declined to answer. This should have tipped us off that he was truly hiding something big. But Hooley pressed on and Pete calmly said that, "In a world where freedom and privacy have become increasingly rare and precious, I choose to hold onto the last vestiges of my liberty. Besides, I can’t think of anything about me that would hold much interest for anyone else." Of course Hooley had no idea what Pete meant by that, but he wrote it down and once we parsed Pete’s meaning, we knew that he was indeed the type of snob we didn’t want to have around.

It was a quiet departure. We’d sent a text message around town telling everyone to quietly meet in Pete’s front yard for a little patriotic confab. We sang a couple choruses of "The Song of Liberty" and "Let Freedom Ring" then Hun Masterson knocked on Pete’s front door. There was little need. Without electric gizmos blaring in his house he was able to hear the singing and had come to the front door to listen. He’d supposed he’d somehow missed Memorial Day and we had come to give him a private concert.

Lola Briggs politely read the petition signed by a good number of the town’s residents, stating that although Pete certainly had the right to be a secretive, non-cooperative, and possibly a communist stick-in-the-mud, he frankly made us a little nervous… and if he’d like to leave town then no one would try to stop him. He did and we didn’t.

I miss Pete. He was a decent enough sort if you ignored his unholy penchant for secrecy and his apparent arrogance. I wish I could text him and tell him that.

You ever in Coonridge, stop by. We may not answer the door, but you’ll enjoy the trip.