Outgoing Male.

Some goons did a number to our mailbox the other day. The event caused me to reminisce, as many minor events do, to days of yore (my yore, not your yore). I was hanging out at Mitch Brown's house some time in the late '70's, when a car rolled up and someone smashed-in his mailbox with a baseball bat. There's never any pattern to these sorts of things. Mitch was voted Friendliest in our class and didn't have any enemies; it was just a random event. 'Course, the lack of any specific animosity didn't prevent us from jumping in my 1970 Ford Maverick and trying to catch the guy. Ford Mavericks were not especially fast cars, but we gave chase nevertheless. We chased the dude for maybe ten minutes in and out of our subdivision, Town and Country. Finally, the dude shook us. Now, Town and Country was a pretty big subdivision (at thirty thousand people or so, it would have been the fourth biggest city in South Carolina), and, as was the case for many subdivisions built or that era, there were only four or five different styles of house, so maybe he just pulled into somebody's driveway and waited for us to pass. We drove slowly and ran our eyes over many a driveway over many a block, with no luck. We finally gave up and I decided to go home. I pulled into my driveway and saw a strange car. I walked up to the window and tapped on the glass. Out of the window peered our student body vice president, Steve Bates. "Dude!", I said (or the 1970's equivalent. Maybe "Hoss!" or "Man!"), "What are you doing? Do you know whose house this is?". He indicated surprise that, out of the 12 thousand or so driveways in Town and Country he could have selected, he had chosen my house for refuge, and that he was aware that the jig was up. He was contrite, and as meek as anybody carrying a baseball bat could be. I'm not sure whether he replaced Mitch's mailbox, but I'm pretty sure he apologized. I'm not expecting history to repeat itself here.