40
William spent the next three weeks working at the local automobile repair garage owned by Stan Wilson. William felt fortunate that the man who stopped to offer him a ride had also offered him a place to stay and a job while he contemplated how he would return to his family. William helped Stan in the garage, performing menial tasks such as changing the motor oil and tires for Stan’s customers. He mostly kept to himself, but during lunch and coffee breaks, William joined Stan in friendly chats with the regular clientele, people who seemed to have perpetual problems with their motorized vehicles.
Sometimes William and Stan would be alone and, during those times, they discussed life and the antics of the people of Glasgow. William liked Stan; the pair got along nicely. Stan marveled at William’s quick learning ability. The fact that William was intelligent was clear to Stan and it seemed odd that he was content to work as a low-paid hand.
William found the town’s library and spent a couple of Saturdays there. On each visit, William stayed until the librarian asked him to leave at closing time.
At night, William sat at the small table in his room above the repair garage and sketched and wrote anything that came to mind relative to what had happened to him and what he could possibly do to get back to his family. He scribbled on sheet after sheet of paper and still nothing seemed to make sense to him.
By now, William had started to blend in with his surroundings. Stan had given William clothing that no longer fit the garage owner; fortunately the two men were the same height and, since William was a slimmer man, the borrowed clothing looked better on William than its owner. After spending a number of evenings alone in his room, William decided to venture out. He discovered the local movie theater that was showing new releases. On one Saturday night he saw two movies: one was Payday, a movie just over twenty minutes in length by Charlie Chaplin. In this silent movie, Charlie Chaplin played a woefully inept day laborer with a crush on the boss’s daughter. William found himself laughing with the audience and enjoying the performance to the point of wanting more. He stuck around for the Mary Pickford feature Tess Of the Storm Country. In this film, Mary Pickford played a land squatter who struggled to survive while living down the hill from a rich man. The rich man’s daughter fell in love with one of the squatters, and another squatter tried to frame the wealthy man for murder. Unlike the Chaplin flick, the Pickford movie went on for well over two hours. William was dumbfounded by the way the scenery and the story itself mesmerized the audience. His concentration swayed back and forth from the screen to witnessing the reaction of the audience. The innocence of the people watching the movie was so powerful that William found that watching them in the dim light of the movie theater was more entertaining than the film itself. William was moved, however, by the black and white scenery of Pebble Beach and Point Lobos, familiar to him from a trip he had made the year before with Kate and the girls. William found it interesting that the area known as 17 Mile Drive was still as famous for its scenic oceanfront, sand dunes and delicate habitat four generations after the movie he was now watching had been produced. It was amazing, he thought, that Pebble Beach in his modern day was one spot on 1,100 miles of the U.S. coastline that remained completely unspoiled.
William studied the people as they left the theater, enthralled by the reaction of the exiting audience over the moving pictures with no sounds. He started to wonder who was better off, these naïve moviegoers or modern-day viewers grown too jaded to appreciate a simple art form such as silent film.
The Saturday night cinema gave William a much-needed mental break. He had relaxed more that night than any other during his journey.
The next day he joined Stan Wilson for breakfast at the local diner and saw some of the faces he had seen at the movie theater. And to William’s surprise, the table talk was still focused on the entertainment of the evening before.
William told Stan how impressed he was by the townspeople’s appreciation of the picture show as well as some of his feelings about life in this simple town. Stan listened with curiosity to this outsider’s view, and then told William that his somewhat odd comments were similar to those expressed by one of Stan’s customers.
“There’s only one other person I’ve ever met who thinks the way you do,” Stan mused. “You and this other fellow, Frank Porter, both have this mysterious wisdom about the future. You ponder things the rest of us here in Glasgow have never given any thought. It’s almost as if the two of you were fortune tellers or something.”
“What exactly do you mean?” William demanded, dropping his fork. Stan proceeded to inform William how this Frank Porter used strange terms, like ‘computer’ and others he could not pronounce.
As soon as Stan gave him Frank’s address, William hastily dropped a dollar on the table, excused himself and practically ran out of the restaurant.