I should have stayed home and knitted by the fire.

     This is Gir, The Sweetest Cat In The World.  He's on my lap in the car while we wait for the person in front of us to wrap up their business with the bank teller. I don't actually drive around with Gir on my lap (I take his welfare very seriously). It's just that we're on our way to the vet after a quick stop at the bank, and it's bad enough to wait in line for very long, but with a cat crying in a cage next to you for long minutes with no end in sight, well, it's awful. So I've turned the engine off, and gotten him out and settled with me.  Gir is happy now, and I'm a little bit happier, because, hey, cuddly cat, but we still aren't moving, and the car in front of me must be signing mortgage papers because I can't think of any drive through bank business that would take this long. 

     Maybe it's not bank business, I think to myself. Maybe the teller and the driver are long lost relatives.  Or maybe they were best friends in high school, but they lost track of each other because the teller left before his senior year was over to follow his favorite band but wound up studying the Purple Martin of West Texas because the band broke up after their West Texas concert and after a night wandering stoned and lost in the fields behind the stage, he discovered the heartache caused by his disbanded musical heroes was soothed by the joyful chirruping of local birds.

     He was soon sending field reports to his high school counselor who was so deeply moved by such scholarly devotion that he changed our Fearless Bank Teller's status from "drop out" to "work/study release", thus enabling him to get his G.E.D. diploma. Fearless Bank Teller lived on fiddle head ferns and cricket legs and bathed in the one working stream of the West Texas Badlands.  He taught himself colloquial and formal Purple Martin, went on to document the rival Pink Polka Dotted Martin language, and then began a brief but effective stint as ambassador during the Martin/Turkey Vulture Kerfuffle of '09. Alas, his stay in Utopia was to be brief.  

     A young, rebellious Purple Martin (with shaved tail feathers and a beak piercing made of cedar elm twigs) spoke to a reporter who was embedded with the Turkey Vultures while she documented the eventual Peace Treaty of 2012 about the reason Fearless Bank Teller decided to leave, in spite of his devotion to birdkind, and recalled that our Fearless Bank Teller had lost patience for the constant politicking, illegal bribery and egg stealing that defined the conflict between the Purple and Pink Polka Dotted Martins and the Turkey Vultures and had left to research the nest building habits of the eastern Arizona Bullfrog as a palate cleanser.

     Amphibian nest building is a far cry from avian linguistics, as anyone knows, so the Fearless Teller's time among the bullfrogs was short and unsatisfying. Mud-covered, discouraged and looking for a new direction in life, he took his specialized skills in avian linguistics and politics and applied to the undergraduate program of Western-West-Far West Texas University to further pursue the pithy patois of feathered friends.

     He was not accepted, because just that week, the school's linguistics department had received a donation of ten million dollars. The department did what any god-fearing Texas institution dedicated to higher learning would do, and donated the money to the football team, who used the funds to hire a manicurist and hairdresser to foster morale of the players. The university then quickly dismantled the language program to help focus further donations that might wander in from devoted alumni.  

     Heartbroken, Our Hero hitchhiked his way north, paying his way with funds gathered by pickpocket Martin loyalists in gratitude for his diplomatic skills. He ran out of cash in Lawrence, Kansas, where he took a job as a teller at a Bank of America. During a break one day, he looked out at the typical Friday afternoon traffic of miles of cars waiting to go through the drive