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The King was widely regarded as a complete fucking jackass, a man who traded his Kingdom and his wondrous gifts for a chain of muffler shops.

The Queen left him immediately, and was followed in short order by his retinue (for he had, in fact, once had a retinue). A few desperate and greasy palace cooks and a handful of stable hands were all that remained of his old life, and these characters he depended on to do his dirty work. There was always much dirty work to be done around the muffler shops.

Who knows where the muffler idea came from? The King himself didn’t have the foggiest notion anymore. All he could remember was that he’d been drunk one night on a riverboat casino, so drunk that he’d not only seemingly lost his magic touch but had apparently abused even the privileges of a king, and he’d been forcibly removed from the boat for urinating in a public drinking fountain.

When he eventually sobered up in a Dubuque hotel room he’d had the realization that he’d lost all interest in being King. Even the gold business had become tiresome to him; when you could turn everything you touched into gold, gold entirely lost all significance and value. The whole formal world of the court bored him to tears. He hated all that ridiculous velvet and the snug knickers and, especially, the strange and foppish hats he always seemed to find himself wearing.

When he found himself penniless in Dubuque he was pleased to discover that he felt absolutely nothing in the way of desperation or regret. If anything, in fact, he experienced something that felt almost like serenity.

Who knows? Perhaps, ultimately, he had been inspired by his older brother, who’d walked out from under his kingdom to launch a hamburger empire. All he knew was that the muffler business –lark though it might initially have been– had eventually demonstrated (and demonstrated conclusively) that he hadn’t lost his old touch after all. Yes, he’d showed them all in the end, Midas had. A man could make boodles of cash in the muffler racket.

I don’t recall if the local giant ever actually claimed to have special powers. It did, however, seem to me that he conducted himself as if he had sprung from the pages of mythology.

What I’m trying to say, I guess, is that this didn’t appear to be just another ordinary, run-of-the-mill giant. For one thing he was a good head taller than any giant I’ve ever seen, and he could balance small children on his nose and juggle dogs without seeming to cause the animals the slightest alarm or discomfort. The dogs actually appeared to enjoy being juggled, in fact. Some of them even slept while the giant was juggling them.

The giant didn’t have much to say, but he was one of those giants whose actions spoke louder than his words. He had a real knack for catching people when they fell, as well as for locating lost objects. He was always returning things to their rightful owners, things that had been missing for great stretches of time –decades, in several notable instances.

Some folks were suspicious of this talent, and spread rumors that the giant had actually stolen the items in question, and was hoarding these things in his lair. To dispel such rumors the giant took out a full-page advertisement in the local newspaper, announcing an open house to which the entire community was invited to inspect his lair and sample his baked goods.

The giant, it turned out, was one heck of a baker, which honestly came as no surprise to his many local admirers. His generous selection of baked goods –many of them quite exotic– put to shame the offerings of any of the small bakeries in town.

Needless to say, those who chose to take advantage of the giant’s hospitality –and there was quite a turnout– saw absolutely no evidence of lost or stolen items. And the very next morning the giant delivered a pristine 1969 Chevrolet Impala, a vehicle that had been missing for over a decade, to the home of its owner, a local school board member.

Any explanation of how or where the giant found these lost objects was never forthcoming. The man was, as I mentioned, notoriously tight-lipped, and most of us had learned to live with his amiable silence.

The giant also had a special rapport with birds; he could persuade them to perch on his head and eat grain from his scalp. On occasion, when he wished to entertain children, he could coax birds to pluck sunflower seeds from his nostrils.

There were some in the community who resented the fact that the giant contributed nothing to the local economy. I have no idea how he survived, but he didn’t seem to have anything to do with money, and eventually there was a successful movement to drive the giant from his lair along a river outside of town to make way for new commercial development.

When the giant left his lair for the last time he did so peacefully, and comported himself with the quiet dignity many of us had come to expect from him. He left behind all of his possessions, with the exception of an opulent, handcrafted, and intricately detailed dollhouse that he carried away in his arms.

A large family of musically gifted grasshoppers inhabited this dollhouse. These grasshoppers, it was said, slept in tiny four-poster beds and filled their little mansion each night with the strains of beautiful music.

The giant finally established a new home for himself (and his family of grasshoppers) in a smaller neighboring community. A short time later we began to hear reports that he was healing people and performing miracles, and that, of course, was when the real trouble started for the poor fellow.

It’s a rather discouraging story, really, and I am too tired at the moment to continue with it, but I shall do so at a time in the very near future.

SWF, young enough, not yet old, weird, fine-enough looking (and that’s not just therapy talking), absolutely no interest in or patience with mingling, machinery, or the usual fanciness. Likes nasty weather, flying and creeping and vulnerable things, C-SPAN when people are just sitting around sipping from glasses of water or clearing their throats, Jeff What’s-His-Name, boiled eggs if someone else does the boiling and knows what they’re doing, Michener (just kidding), Albert Schweitzer (his mustache, anyway, if I’m thinking of the right guy, and I’m probably not), canned goods if they have interesting labels, Chick-O-Sticks, chili, dogs if they do what they’re told, coffee, cold beverages, hippies (although I suppose it kind of depends on what you mean by hippies and if you mean what I think you mean, then no), certain types of music when I’m in the mood for certain types of music, driving on bad roads, sitting on my ass listening to you play your harmonica or whatever it is you play, sitting quietly in the dark, eavesdropping, the sun when it’s least expected or most welcome, people who care enough to wave signs (just so long as they don’t try to get too close to me or ask me to sign anything), hot sauce, roaring fires, mashed potatoes, fried potatoes, potatoes, books if they’re any good, and You: If you ask questions, own at least two forks and one plate, know your way around a microwave oven, have so much passion you don’t know what to do with it all, and would please please please at least make a conscious effort to be kind and gentle and sweet.