A Different Man by Andrew L. Huerta

A Different Man by Andrew L. Huerta

Author:Andrew L. Huerta [Huerta, Andrew L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781635559767
Publisher: Bold Strokes Books
Published: 2021-09-01T22:15:33+00:00


Sex, Love, and Intellectual Property

Mrs. Brickman was the woman in his story, with her light gray hair, wide-brimmed hat, bright yellow blouse, royal blue cotton pants, and her grabber tool. When I realized it was her, I stopped in the middle of the road.

She held a long, white aluminum tool with dark gray jaws that clicked together at the bottom. The device was engineered to tightly grab on to small items without Mrs. Brickman having to bend over or reach down into the gravel of her front yard. With her grabber tool, Mrs. Brickman was methodically clearing away the long yellow seed pods that fell from her mesquite tree. With a black bucket at her side, she stood in one position and picked up one seed pod after the other. Individually she carefully placed them into her plastic bucket and used the tool to reach back down for another.

Without bending or turning, she meticulously worked her way through a small section of the yard. One section of the gravel was completely clean. It appeared as if she had cleared away a fourth of the seed pods that covered the ground underneath the tree. I had no idea how long it had taken her, but I was amazed at how patiently she went about her work.

Mrs. Brickman was a neighbor. She lived about a block away from my condo. I had only met her once, over five years ago at a neighborhood watch meeting. A few of the houses in our neighborhood had been robbed, and we all came together to see what we could do. Back then Mrs. Brickman was quiet, sweet, and very old. But now she was even older; probably in her early nineties. And she seemed to be the kind of woman who wanted to stay active and keep her mind as sharp as possible.

I had never seen her out in her front yard before, clearing away the yellow seed pods with her long grabber tool, but Tom had used her, or carefully described this image of her, in one of his short stories. He’d written it over five years ago, and it stood out in his collection, which needs to find a publisher but lies dormant on my dining room table in a large manila envelope.

Tom Horne worked for the University of Arizona when I met him ten years ago. He was cerebral, introverted, and a hell of a lot of fun. He looked like the actor Edward Norton in the film American History X. Not as young and thin and in shape, but pretty damn close. We met at an outreach event sponsored by Tom’s job. Tom was an admissions counselor at U of A, and the event included high school students from South Tucson.

At the time, I was a new employee in U of A’s College of Medicine, and I had my own browsing table at the event. I spoke to students and parents about careers in the health professions and about our health-related majors at U of A.



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