He’s tall, thin, and tweedy; dressed in a combination of wheat-coloured linens and wool and accented with dramatic scholarly tortoiseshell glasses and thick rumpled hair. His presence is out of sync in our little town that houses not one but two feed and tack stores and a pharmacy that has a livestock medication section. He would be better placed in Oxford or an EM Forster novel (adapted into a movie by Merchant Ivory Productions undoubtedly). I don’t get to hear his voice but I imagine he must speak with a plummy English accent and teach a corking history class. Despite his incongruity with his surrounding, he doesn’t look at all uncomfortable. He walks purposefully down the sidewalk, all angles and bones with an alert straight-ahead focus thinking his professorial thoughts. I see him hold his hand out behind his back and waggle his fingers even as he continues to look straight ahead. In a few moments a tow-headed blonde boy, dressed similarly in his Sunday best, (including a tie), trots up behind the tweedy man and grabs the extended hand. I look away momentarily and when I look back I am treated to the sight of the two of them skipping across the crosswalk.