August 30

14C Cloudy
Here is that piece I promised, sorry that it's not well written but had to do it in a hurry.

In everyone’s life there are always certain characters who find a niche and although they aren’t on your mind everyday, you recall them periodically. One such person that my wife and I knew as Mr. Mike, was one of those people.

We met him when we lived and worked in Florida, he lived next door to us in the town house complex we lived in. He was somewhere in his 80’s at the time, he had apparently been an officer in the US Air Force, but some of our other neighbors claimed he had also been an agent for the CIA. Personally I believe both things were true.

He was very secretive and seldom gave anyone a straight answer. He had full retired military privileges for travel on Air Force planes. For some reason he took a bit of a ‘shine’ to the both of us. What started his ‘we’re friends’ thing with me was when he walked by the swimming pool one day and found me doing some laps. He immediately hustled into his house and came out a few minutes later wearing a bathing suit. He wasn’t very tall and his body was stringy and thin as many older men are. He walked up to the edge of the pool and without hesitating went in in a shallow dive and came up into almost a racing crawl, without stopping he did four end to end rushes, then slowed down to a more sedate but still strong stroke. Later he asked me if I came out to the pool very often and when I said that I did, he said, “Good I’ll join you, just let me know when you are going in.” So we started swimming together a couple of times a week.

One day he started telling me about some gold mines he was involved with in South America. He didn’t go into any detail and to this day I don’t know which country or countries. Most of the time he was very lucid but always coy about his earlier life.

We never found out why his driver’s license was taken away, we suspected that he may have had an ‘incident’ and due to his age that prompted the cancellation. We found out when he came over one day and asked Maryann to drive him to a Doctor’s appointment, she did and that became almost a bi weekly chore for her. One day she looked out and he was sitting behind the wheel of his car and she went out and asked him what he was doing. He replied that he thought he might drive himself that day. She got after him and said, “Mr. Mike you cannot do that you don’t have a license any more and it will only mean trouble.”

Well his response was, “They only got my Florida license, I’ve still got these.” He pulled out his wallet and showed her licenses from three other states!

She scolded him some more, loaded him in our car and took him to his appointment.

We didn’t notice right away but he did start to have some mental lapses and what really got our attention was when he walked in to our house one morning (we were still in bed), into our bedroom and asked if one of us could come and turn his kitchen stove on as he didn’t know how. Maryann went back with him and found he had forgotten how to turn his electric range on.  A week or so later he became quite convinced that his insurance agent was trying to cheat him out of his money, he showed up at our door again and asked if I would come and help look for some money, that he had hidden so the insurance fellow couldn’t find it. I went back with him and laying on his kitchen table was an envelope that had more than ten thousand dollars in it!

We went to the resident manager of the complex and found out he had a brother from out of state. We phoned him and outlined what we saw as a problem that was intensifying  quickly. The brother came a few days later and tried to reason and rationalize things, but Mr. Mike was also extremely stubborn and wasn’t co-operative. The upshot was that a few weeks later, the brother had him sent to a home in a neighboring state. That lasted less than a week then Mike bribed a security guard and had himself delivered to a nearby air force  base and disappeared.

He was gone a couple of months then suddenly showed up back at his own home. What we later found out is that he just kept moving and was all over the country and of course the military didn’t co-operate in determining his whereabouts.

When he showed up at our door one evening and we had a visit with him, his response to our questions about where he had been was simply, “Oh nowhere, I just went here and then I went there.” He said this with a sly smile on his face.

His brother finally came once more, and eventually some arrangement was made and Mike went away once more. His townhouse and car were both sold and we saw him no more. We heard a few years later that he had died.