" T O   K E E P   Y O U R
C H A R A C T E R   I N T A C T
Y O U   C A N N O T   S T O O P
T O   F I L T H Y   A C T S.
I T   M A K E S   I T   E A S I E R
T O   S T O O P   T H E
N E X T   T I M E "
Katherine Hepburn

" T H E   R E A L
C H A R A C T E R   O F   A
M A N   I S   F O U N D
O U T   B Y   H I S
A M U S E M E N T S "
Jean Iris Murdoch

" B E   K I N D ,
F O R
E V E R Y O N E
Y O U
M E E T
I S
F I G H T I N G
A
H A R D E R
B A T T L E "
Plato

The "town character" is a position of prominence in a small town. He cannot be ignored. He knows everyone and everyone knows him. No one can walk by him as if he does not exist. He is a member of the community by virtue of his position alone. Consequently, he is to be acknowledged and accepted. Anyone shunning the town character puts their own status in the community at risk.

Being a character in a small town means having a number of idiosyncrasies that set him well apart from everyone else. An idiosyncrasy is an attribute that is "peculiar" to a specific person. A town character is, quite simply, the most peculiar person in town.

In the small community where I grew up, you had to go some to be the most peculiar person in town. Per capita, we had the most candidates for town character of any town in the area. There was never an official contest to determine the winner, although the thought does bring images of a beauty contest in a bad dream.

I would have voted for Crooked Charlie. He was nicknamed Crooked because of his deformed spine. He was forced to look at people by peeking out of the top of his eyes from his stooped posture. Crooked spent most of his life looking down. It was probably a lot easier than looking up. His posture in life, I think, also became his attitude about life and himself.

He would have no memory of his last bath. It was shortly after he was born, I am sure. Crooked could have been nicknamed Barnie because he smelled like a barn. More to the point, he smelled like cow manure.

The pant leg bottoms of his bib overalls were stiff with it. Working as a hired hand on a farm meant a life sentence of the worst jobs, like cleaning up after cows in the barn. He probably had no awareness of how bad he smelled because he had so little experience smelling good. He would have been like a dog after a bath, running around and rolling in anything that would remove that awful odour of soap and shampoo.

No one sat close to Crooked on a hot day or inside a heated room during the winter. Heat kindled his "essence" and brought it to life. It rose with the heat, gradually enveloping him in an expanding aura invisible to the eye but pungent to the nose. Conversations with Crooked were usually done in haste or in the freezing cold.

Someone once took pity on Crooked and gently suggested that it would be a good idea for him to put on new overalls. As a lowly hired man on a farm, he did exactly as he was told. He put on new overalls. No one told him to take off the old ones first. Of course, that only made matters worse. Two layers of overalls increased his body heat and created an insulating layer of warm air between them. His crusted pant legs were now between two sources of direct heat that kept him fresh even in chilled air.

Crooked often sat alone in the town park in the better weather, like one of those sculptures of the common man sitting on a bench you see in big city parks. Except there were no bird droppings on his head and shoulders. Apparently even the birds knew to keep their distance. The only sign of life was the slow movement of his jaw as he munched on a banana. Unless, of course, you included the flies that buzzed around him. People said the good thing about Crooked was that he drew the flies so they did not bother anyone else.

Crooked did not brush his teeth, consequently he had fewer and fewer teeth to justify taking up the practice. It was a lot easier for him to eat bananas than it was, say a crispy apple or corn on the cob. His remaining teeth seemed to sprout at random from the wide expanses of bare gums. Those teeth were stained a dark brown from chewing tobacco, which of course, is not really chewing, it is mostly spitting.

He also often sat alone in the pool hall near a spittoon. "Near a spittoon" is how I would describe where he spit. As the saying goes, "close" only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. An errant cue ball was more likely to hit the mark than Crooked and often did, bringing the on-going pool game to an abrupt halt amidst cries of disgust.

Apart from his odour, appearance and habits, Crooked was generally a quiet and gentle soul. Except on Saturday nights, when he had a "few too many". He would let out a whoop, head to the jukebox and punch in the Beer Barrel Polka. Crooked would dance around the floor, all by himself, with his pant legs pulled up almost to his knees, revealing skinny, hairless, little white legs with worn out socks hanging over the top of his work boots. That aside, he moved with surprising grace and agility in harmony with the music, absorbed in the enjoyment of the experience.

It was an amazing transformation, although not what I would call a pretty sight. Crooked was deeply inspired by the Beer Barrel Polka, if by nothing else in his life. It was quite warming to see him so thoroughly enjoying himself. And I saw in those brief minutes of the music that there was more to Crooked than met the eye, or any of the senses. And suddenly he seemed a little less peculiar.