This story with a badge in
Toronto happened many years ago. May be it is
true may be not - the decision is yours.
Who has never dreamt of a large collection of
badges as a child? So large, that it wouldn’t even fit in a pocket. I have
dreamt. And once my dream came true. It was just one badge, though. One badge
is not much, but it was a real one and a heavy one as well. I was walking
downtown Toronto I still had to leg it
to the next block although I already walked for a while, and there it lay -
crushed by cars, faded of rain and covered in rust. The badge. I didn’t care
that enamel was down in parts, the clasp was broken and you couldn’t even tell
what was on the badge, as the letters were obliterated and there was just some
enamel on the red flag. The thing was I had a badge that none of my friends,
most probably, owned.
It happened so that John from a nearby street
came up to me. I took the badge from my pocket and started to examine it with a
very serious look on my face. John, being curious, snatched it out of my hands
and saying "Wow” started to examine it on all sides, he even bit it, and said
(lied, of course) that his uncle had one like that, even two, and would soon
send him one of them.
That didn’t really disappoint me. "He still has
to send it, you know”, said I easily, took the badge from him and put it back
into my pocket with an important look.
At school another guy came to me and said "Will
you show me the badge?”. Right, John from the nearby street has already told
him, and not only him, probably everyone he met on the street. Of course, I
took the badge out with pride - now wrapped in a cloth, - showed it to him and
asked "Has John twaddled I had this badge?”. And I added that John’s uncle had
the same badge and promised to send to him. "But don’t believe him, he’s
lying”, said I. Maybe Uncle Pete (that was the name of John’s uncle from old
Toronto) did have such a
badge, but he was not going to give it to him after all. Because, when uncle
Pete came to stay with John’s parents last summer, he gave him many things. A
fishing rod, for example. And John left it at the pond, well, not left but
lost: he got tired of sitting by the fishing rod, so he stuck it in the ground
and went along the bank to stretch his legs. When he came back there was no
fishing rod.
And you can’t say what happened: either it got stolen, or he
couldn’t find the place where he had left it. Uncle Pete also gifted John a
knife. A cool knife, with one blade broken though, and more than a half left of
another one. But Uncle Pete never said anything about the badge. So John just
lied about it.
Другие произведения автора:
Шерлок Холмс. Неизвестные страницы.
О коммунизме.
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