Aliens ask the darndest things. And when they do, sometimes they'll make you see your day just a little differently.
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But on this weekend, I wasn’t just having any slouch of a Sunday. I was having a Sunday where the sunshine smooched the back of your neck like a dirty little lover in the morning, and the birds in the old oak tree sang like The Jones Girls, and a good alien friend of mine had just turned to me wearing a mustache of whipped cream from his coffee as he asked, “How do the good days happen?”

I wanted to gulp down the coffee left in my mouth and holler, “How the hell should I know?” But my late wife used to tell me on Sundays just like this, with her nightgown draped around her old bosom like French curtains, that my cursing did the day of the Lord no flattery.

Neither does lying. And so I’ll give you the truth: it was hard to muster up the arrogance to tell my far-out friend some even-farther-fetched fallacy about how the “good days” work.

It’s a tricky question, isn’t it?

I don’t like to weather the tricky questions. 

That’s why when the neighbor’s son stretched over my fence by his tippy-toes and asked me if his dog would have chew toys up in heaven after it’d been run over by a Chevy truck, I froze.

That’s why when the crematorium called and asked what I wanted my wife’s urn to say, I stalled ‘til they shipped back a vase that only read, “Karol F. Bearing 1910 – 1983,” with no words underneath.

Get the pattern? Well, that ought to explain this next story, too: 

One night, months ago, I was looking to get some sleep and got around to counting sheep. They hopped gaily in my head over a little wooden fence that couldn’t, and they sounded like most sheep probably should –for a while, at least.

“Baah,” went one.

“Bahaah,” went another 

“BEEEE-WEEEW-OWO-WOW-OWWWWW-WOOOOSH,” went the last one, in a screeching, pulsing yawn that couldn’t have been mistaken for any sheep I’d heard. Either way, I thought, it came from the basement.

So I opened my eyes, perked right out of bed, and did what any good sport would’ve done.

I groped around under my bed until I felt something the size of my good old home-defense bat, clenched the grip, and felt a couple ball games younger. 

I bowed my head for a little mercy prayer –maybe for myself, maybe for the punk liable to meet the homerun-end of my bat.

I threw a glance at my landline and really considered, as usual, whether I should phone up the Sheriff’s Office for this one.

Naw.

I walked down one flight of steps, slowly, then another, slowly, leaning on my bat a little as a makeshift cane, until I reached the foot of the basement door. I creaked it wide open and had a look down the stairway. 

Nothing.

Then I gritted my teeth and kept trekking down. I fought a battle with my wobbly knees as I reached the bottom, and surveyed every lifeless outline of the dark room.

Nothing.

Hm.

So then I crept over to the light switch and figured it wouldn’t hurt to flip it on.

And that’s when I made a sound. A distinct one, not unlike the sound sheep are supposed to make when they’re scared half to death.

Because the spot where my leather recliner was supposed to be, last I’d checked, was gone, and replaced with a throbbing sphere of genuine, utter nothingness. It swallowed all the room’s light and my very best chair in the house without so much as a belch, and when I poked it with my bat, I felt it try to yank me in like I was the day’s first catch. By then there was no doubt about it…

It was a wormhole. 

Hmm.

So I stood and watched it.

And when my knees buckled in protest, I sat on the steps and watched it.

And when my eyes grew heavy, I went upstairs for a quick cup of coffee, crawled my way back down, sat on the steps, and watched the wormhole.

For a good while there, I’d been looking at just that; just a wormhole. And I had my bat leaned on the stairs with me just in case the wormhole felt like being anything but.

And it stayed that way.

So I went for a sip of my coffee.

That’s when a funny thing started to poke out from the top of it.

A droopy pair of antennae. A pair of green, bendy stalks, wagging and waving their heads through the wormhole like two curious caterpillars sticking out for a whiff of where my recliner used to be.

Then a green little head and a tall pair of eyes stretched out of the wormhole.

The eyes blinked.

So did mine.

Then the guy on the other side–his antennae, his big eyes, and his whole tiny body–sprang up through the strange space tunnel and crashed onto the basement floorboards head first.

I blinked a second time to make sure I was really awake.

Then, he pulled himself up off the floor, stood up straight, strong, and maybe two feet short, and looked me in the eye.

He pointed at the cup of coffee in my hand. Then he mimed holding an imaginary mug with both his green hands, and taking one long, thirst-quenching sip of whatever he thought I was having.

So I blinked a third time.

I saw the alien was still there, and still thirsty. He was playing charades with his pretend mug, shaking it about and waiting for me to refill it. 

And that was when I knew, well enough, that I’d done right by not squealing to the St. Mary’s County Sheriff’s Office.

‘Cause otherwise, I’d have been in for a whole lot of tricky questions that night.
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Studying him across the table, I tried pronouncing his name in my head a couple times. I failed, of course, like any human tongue would. His written name uses no characters found on Earth, but its acoustics fall somewhere between “Brobble” and “Grammulb” –and if you can imagine this sound, I’m sorry to say you’re only in the ballpark, at best.

In a gentlemanly truce, he and I have settled on nicknames for each other that ring close enough to the real thing.

On weekend mornings, when he waltzes through the wormhole and visits, I’ll climb downstairs to the kitchen, meet him by the coffee pot, and I’ll say, “Mornin’ Grob.”

Grob, waiting for me to help him make and pour the coffee, will watch me navigate my stairway (slow ‘n steady, with no help from the guard rail) as he says, “Good morning, Ed!”

My real name’s Eddie. I never said we made a fair truce.

Grob looks funny. He’s no taller than my kitchen counter –which is why he’ll wait for me to make him a coffee. I like to have a cup, too, and when I do, I’m the first to sweeten mine up with some pistachio syrup. The color of that little nut peeking through its shell on the artwork of the syrup bottle, well, that’s the shade of Grob’s skin; a soft sage green. He’s got short, stocky legs with nubs on the end of them like rainboots. He has no nose or neck, but has two tiny, pillowy protrusions as a mouth and two big doughy eyes like cow spots. Grob doesn’t seem to blink, breathe, or to have had a single bout of back pain –but he’s alright, he says, thanks to a network of microscopic pores that do the biological heavy lifting for him. I’ve found that the less I ask about this, the easier I can gulp down my daily Aspirin without getting all too jealous, first.

And Grob’s patient, too. He’s one of the last ones, it seems, who’ll bother talking to an oldie with modest social security checks and even cheaper hearing aids. But Grob reminded me then that even he could only be so patient, when he said, in his nasally, boyish voice, “Ed? Earth to Ed? Hellooooohhh?

I panicked a little, something like a chicken leaping off the Empire State who’d forgotten he never really had the knack for flying. I might’ve been staring blankly at Grob for minutes —Christ, could’ve been hours— in some senile fit of aloofness.

But we had no such trouble on our hands; the sun still soaked our backsides on the patio, our hot coffees still blew little chimneys of steam, and Grob still wore the same question on his face about the good days.

“You did hear my question, right Ed?” Then I heard Grob snicker and say, “didn’t let all of your hairies plug your ears up this week, didya, Ed?” 

I knew Grob didn’t have a nose, but I always thought he was pinching it shut when he laughed, the way it sounded.

I shooed my hand at him like he’d been an alien-shaped mosquito as I tried to rile up one of our typical chummy arguments. Maybe we’d get carried away and forget about Grob’s big question altogether? “Oh easy for you to say,” I said, with one of those hawkish squints you’ll find highbrow country-clubbers throwing at their caddies. “You don’t grow ear hair anyhow –or any of this stuff, for that matter.”

“Not so quite, Ed,” Grob said, jerking a little green finger of his at his two antennae, rustling like cattails in the breeze. “Looksee at these. I’m overdue for a trim, see?”

That’s when I apologized that I couldn’t give him a barber recommendation. “This scalp of mine hasn’t grown hair in some 15 years, Grob. Everywhere else, though…”

I went on talking about the hairs of an old widower that only my showerhead sees, waiting for Grob to volunteer some sign of disgust. Then I remembered he didn’t have eyebrows to furl, and that one time, he’d let me explain the procedures of my colonoscopy only to say, admiringly, “Oh this Earth!”

So, I cut the act and got back on topic, and I guessed that Grob’s query about my ear hair wasn’t really the question he wanted an answer to.

“No,” Grob said, watching all the birds fluttering and tweeting and hopping together in the oak tree’s sprawling arms. “I asked something bigger, Ed.”

“Yeah,” I went. “I heard your big question the first time, you know?”

I didn’t expect to offer the truth, but it’s hard giving anything else to a friend while he’s looking at some birds like their feathers are made of life’s real meaning.

I turned to face the tree, too, and shared the sight of the songbirds with him while I nursed my coffee. I took a sip and opened my mouth to talk too early, and a little drop of it trickled down my chin before I wiped it against my poor cardigan sleeve.

“What business do you think I’ve got, huh?” I said, “Knowing how the good days really happen?” 

Then I said, in a tone that might not have hid my vexation all that well, “Do you think I plan them?”

“No,” said Grob, with the stuffy nose he didn’t have. “But donchya ever get wonderee that someone has to?”

“Well sure,” I said, still looking at the birds. They weren’t such an easy distraction for me. “Sure, but I’m not high enough in the pecking order to decide how they happen –or to know at all who makes ‘em happen.”

Then Grob looked down at the coffee swaying in his cup. 

“Well they happen,” he said. “Sometimes in kind, sometimes hardlee a smitchee, but they happen.” 

The little green man slumped down over his mug to meet his drink in the eye, and he must’ve caught the frown growing across his reflection as he asked me something big, once again:

“Ed? Dooya think the good days are all random?”
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Grob’s like you and me, he doesn’t like the bad ones. 

Now, it’s not like the bad days are killing him; here he is, fairly healthy and fairly merry. But if he knew how they happened, if he knew how to stop them, he tells me he’d do just that.

A few visits ago, over a game of mancala, Grob told me he’d gotten a job as a spaceship taximan. He tells me he’s pulling in a decent paycheck that at least one in every dozen folks oughta envy. The guy’s happy to report he’s got no children running around and no spouse, either. Somewhere through the wormhole, under a four-foot tall apartment ceiling, it’s just little old Grob and the throes of a life he’s trying to puzzle out. 

He doesn’t tell me much about his bad days there, and I uphold my end and keep quiet about mine. But for the few months I’ve known him, he’s always been curious about why the universe is kind to him, when it is.

Grob will sometimes ask, like a child buckled tight in a booster seat, why some nice things happen. 

“Why does my coffee make me feel so easie-easie, today?” 

Who knows, Grob, I might say, You can thank Mr. Coffee. 

“Why does this CD make me want to wiggle up and down and do the tapsies?” 

Maybe I shrug at Grob and say, ‘Cause good music makes you wanna get the goodness out.

So when he looked down at his coffee and imagined a world where the things that made him happy were the result of random equations –slashed on a chalkboard by a listless mathematician in a scuffed lab coat who owed his existence to a mindless thing called Chance– Grob looked up at me with a frown that didn’t wear any secrets.

I gulped down a little lukewarm coffee. It was getting cold. 

“Can’t be,” I told him. It can’t be random. “For the universe to tear open a wormhole in my basement and suck up my favorite recliner of forty-whatever-years, that’s gotta be payback for something. 

“And, you know,” I went on, giving Grob the little grin he needed to get past this slump, whatever it was, “to give a lonely man like me a new friend for the first time in a long while –and out of a space portal, for Christ’s sake– that can’t be random, Grob. It can’t.”

Grob smiled. I’d bet that he would. What I didn’t bet on was that instead of giving me a nod and a thank you (as I hoped he really might’ve), he wanted to pitch me another tricky question:

“You say that now and again, Ed. Thingies about a ‘Christ,’” Grob said, greeting my eyes again like a portrait of a caged pup. “Is this ‘Christ’ the put-together-er of the good days?”

What was I supposed to do? Throw on a biretta and turn this chit-chat into a Sunday sermon? 

Should I have answered Yes, and left Grob to infer that his joys –both here and on his home world– were a bunch of predetermined hoopla? 

Would I leave him the breadcrumbs to conclude, therefore, that this Christ of ours was responsible for the bad days, also? 

And would I, the cul-de-sac’s retired widower and the prescriber of this big reality pill, tell myself that Karol wouldn’t have gotten to watch our oak tree grow, anyway, because someone up high didn’t plan things that way?

No. That wouldn’t do me or Grob any good. Not even on a Sunday.

So what would?

I lurched in for a sip of coffee, and the toe of my slipper happened to scrape up a mancala piece, loitering prettily down on the concrete like a dame that’d gotten in with the wrong crowd.

The older you get, it seems, the more you’re reminded of man’s ageless vulnerability to all things pretty and shiny and in need of saving. This was one of those reminders.

The beauty stole my attention for a second. It looked like a paper dove cradled inside a teardrop, and the dove was crying through the teardrop a little S.O.S. ditty that sang, “pick me up from the ground!”  

But back pain is a cruel mistress. And on any morning half as good as this, it’s best not to rile her up.

I kicked the piece back into a crack in the cement and returned to my sip. Just when my fingers coiled around the handle, though, it felt like I’d been plucked out of time and space and jammed right back, all in a single flash!

An idea ripped through my body and brain like a vein of lightning. 

My first guess was that this might’ve been a minor stroke of mine, but maybe it’d just been that long since I thought up a plan so bright. 

I know, I thought. I’ve got it! 

I looked down at the puddle of coffee in my cup, and then at Grob’s, which was just as emptied, and then at the mancala piece wedged in the crack, then back at Grob, and then onto my patio door –which I’m sure we didn’t accidentally lock, this time.

That’s when I grinned at Grob and said what he’d waited too long to hear.

“Tell ya what, Grob,” I said, “I’ll show you how the good days can happen. Lemme head inside and snatch up everything that’ll do the trick for us. Wait here, buddy.” 

I ambled to the sliding glass door (with no help from my cane that day, either) and told Grob to count how many airplanes he could find before I got back.

Grob, probably surprised by the suddenness of this whole motion, punched his arm out at me with a little thumbs-up sprouting from his fist. 

“O.K.,” he went.
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See, what Grob needed wasn’t some grand revelation from the eye of the cosmos. The guy needed a reminder; a reminder of how easily the good days could really happen.

And after fifteen minutes, Grob’s reminder came waddling behind him through the patio doorway with a filled-up snakeskin purse and a fresh pot of coffee.

“How many airplanes didya find, Grob?”

Grob pointed his finger up at the sky, still counting the last few he could see. 

“Twentee-two,” he answered. Grob has “supra-physical vision,” as he calls it, and this makes him hard to keep up with whenever we get to staring at the stars.

He turned and saw me trying my darndest to heave the bag off my shoulder. Soon enough, the little alien was at my hip helping me wrestle it off and onto the table. His height didn’t do him any favors. 

Rushing back to his seat with his stubby legs, his puzzlement was obvious as he asked me what the bag was for.

“This is it, Grob,” I said, jabbing my finger at the bloated purse on the table. “This right here is how the good days happen.”

Grob twirled his antenna with his finger, trying to wrap his brain around this. 

I could tell he wasn’t getting it.

“Well,” I said, “this is what all the good days are made of, anyway.” 

Grob twirled the other antenna around his finger, trying to tell me he wasn’t getting it.

“I’m not so sure-ee I get it,” he said, pointing his finger at the one busy twirling his antenna around. “See?”

“Okay, Grob,” I sighed, “how’s about we just dig inside and figure it out, then?”

Grob shot his little pistachio thumb up again. His smile blossomed, and the lattice of all his tiny white teeth made his face look like a backpack zipper that was just happy; life could be such a swell thing, indeed. 

Then he said, eagerly, “How’s about it, Ed!”

A few minutes later, Grob and I sat back down at our table and found a funny mess of funny things scattered all over it. 

And we were happy for the mess. We made it ourselves.

Splayed across the table were disc cases of every color, a CD-player, a bundle of floral art books, a wooden mancala board and half-a-hundred of its dazzling little beads, an old baseball, a bottle of whipped cream, the daily crossword, an etch-a-sketch, our coffee pot, and a newly-limp purse. 

Minus the tacky bag, these oddities were the things Grob and I liked to liven up our Sundays with –and all in one place! While the songbirds peeked over at our curious clutter, Grob turned to me with a question that was, finally, so small and simple:

“But why all this stuff, Ed? Why come back with all our usual silliees?”

“Cause this is what all the good days are made of, buddy,” I said, sprawling my arms open to welcome our auditorium of “Sunday sillies,” as Grob knew I called them. I began pouring myself a refill of hot coffee, then the alien’s, as I asked him, “Wanna know how this stuff makes up all the good days? The coffee and our doodads, here?”

Grob scratched the top of his green head. “I don’t know. Are the good days made of plastic, paper, mancala beads, and caffeine?” 

“I guess I dunno either, Grob,” I said, reaching for the crossword and a #2 pencil. “They might be. But they’re made of some other things, too: peace, friendship, and a time-killer or two to keep your thumbs busy.”

Grob’s dough eyes were taller than usual as he surveyed the sillies. He’d forgotten all about the birds in the tree –the meaning of life was right here, now. 

“And this,” he asked, “is really how the good days happen? Just like this here-y and that’s all?”

“‘This here-y,’” I said, “is one way. And it’s my favorite way, these days –with you around to see me, and all.” 

I watched Grob smile at that (like the sucker for sweetness he is), and then scooch in for a swig of coffee. He decided he needed whipped cream –and then some more, because he liked shaking the bottle almost as much as the sugary foam that came out of it.

“Now,” I said to Grob, “why don’t you give an old man a load off and set us up a round of mancala?” 

“Sure thingy,” Grob said, with his whipped cream mustache back in full bloom. “Whaddaya wanna listen to? We’ve got Loose Ends, Angela Boo-fill, Bobby Caldwell…”

“It’s your pick today,” I told him, knowing well enough that he’d picked the music last weekend. It didn’t matter, though. I’d already started burying my nose hairs in the crossword and betting aloud that I wouldn’t even need the hint section, that time. 

I was preparing to attack the first blank word of the DOWN column when I heard Grob’s stuffy voice again. 

“Ed?”

“Yeah, Grob?”

I found a new smile that day when Grob said, while making a salad bowl out of the CDs and deciding which one to play, “I’m happy you’re my friend.”