Excerpt:

Chapter One
The Once Upon A Time Part

Once upon a time, I had the misfortune to meet a small elderly woman with a crooked back. She wore an assortment of fantastically colored scarves, pinned together on one shoulder with a large brooch in which half the rhinestones were missing. Our meeting would not have been so very misfortunate, except for the timing and placing of the event. As it would happen, the little woman happened to step out of Toppenhiemer’s bakery on Swiss Street - a fine, snug establishment with arguably the best doughnut twists in town and very curious pies - and onto the pavement just as I was ducked down in my vehicle to catch a mischievous CD case that had tumbled beneath the driver’s seat.
There ought to be a good lesson learnt in that. To never fiddle with CD cases while driving a car. Or while driving a truck or a boat or a unicycle for that matter. Not even when the CD is Andy Williams or Ella Fitzgerald, although leniency may be made for certain other members of the musical circles, to remain unnamed and innocent.
For me, it was Stravinsky - one with an especially nice and artistic cover (so often CD cover artists think they can get away with the most meager of efforts, just because the musician inside happens to be better than they are. Or dead. Or both. It’s ridiculous.) I had been listening to his “Blue Waltz”[Stravinsky, Blue Waltz?]trying to unwind on the way to a particularly unpleasant appointment at the dentist’s office….
Poor Stravinsky. He didn’t make it.
That decrepit old brooch on the little woman’s shoulder caught a ray of sun and dashed it into my car just before my car dashed into the little woman. I slammed a dirty green leather driving moccasin into the brakes and waited for the wheels to stop screeching against the pavement, praying for three more inches between my bumper and the shiny metal cane with three rubber toes that the little woman calmly clutched in her wrinkled fingers.
I felt the quartet of curiosity wrinkles gather on my forehead as the car screeched forward. “That’s going to make wrinkles one day!” my mother used to warn me as my ten-year-old forehead crinkled in four precise lines, watching people having arguments at the supermarket or staring at couples on the ferris wheel. She was right. The four precise lines were old friends of mine now and seemed to keep me company even without an intriguing live show of humanity to watch. I couldn’t help it, not at first. People were so interesting! They talk about things that don’t matter, they laugh at oddly shaped tomatillos, they hum Barry Manilow to themselves when they think no one can hear… But recently, the four lines had been taunting me in the mirror and I did my best to hold back my rollicking curiosity in a placid, if still impolite, stare. Until now.
The corners of her floral scarf drifting on a breeze, the little woman faced my charging, scratched blue Honda as if it were just another small dog coming to inspect her brown paper sack of Toppenhiemer’s doughnuts. She even took the time to scratch an itch on her elbow and notice a small flock of gray pigeons fluttering up out of the square. Of course, it could have been that being a small elderly woman of very slow habits, she might have started these things before stepping out onto the street and the scratch had just now caught up with her.
Either way, just as the ankle attached to my right foot on the brake began to ache terribly, I thought to myself that this little lady seemed like quite the character to know and that if either of us survived this crash, I should like to take her out for coffee - to go with the doughnuts, of course. Make that if both of us should survive this crash. I do like people a terrible lot, but not dead ones and I don’t intend to go about haunting old ladies in floral scarves after my demise.