Part 3 - Enter Phil

The coffee shop bulletin board was covered with three or four layers of concert posters, business cards and flyers for self help groups. Phil was not the kind of person who would just plaster his poster on top of the other posters. This made his postering job rather time consuming, but he didn’t mind taking the time to rearrange the posters by date, removing the old ones and folding them carefully into a large, dog eared folder that he carried in his messenger bag. He was putting up posters for a band called the Stamp Lickers, who were appearing at a gas station turned nightclub the following month.

In order to pull out the tacks, he had to take off his mittens. He could have used fingerless gloves, but there was something about fingerless gloves that irritated Phil. He thought they made him look too much like he was trying to look tough or something. His mittens, on the other hand, had that “just back from grandma’s house” look. While he didn’t exactly cultivate that mystique, he preferred it to the fingerless glove look.

Actually, the mittens had not come from his grandma, who was a retired congresswoman and had little time for knitting. He had made them himself. It hadn’t taken him any time, since it was a long bus ride to his other job, feeding fish in the various pools at the botanical gardens. He just took his knitting with him and did a few rows as he rode each way. It was frustrating when people got to talking to him and he dropped a stitch, or forgot which row he was on, but even with those distractions, he finished the mittens in a few weeks. They were grey, with brown stripes.