eating pancakes, not chasing rabbits. I think that’s the fastest I ever ran.”
“Pancakes?” the man asked.
Clarence recognized the man’s voice. “Hey! How do you know Harley’s name? You’re the guy from the diner. You’re the one who likes giants!”
“Diner?” the man looked puzzled and Clarence realized the man didn’t know him. “Sorry I don’t recall.”
“Sure you remember! We were eating pancakes in the diner and you rode a motorcycle,” Clarence explained.
“I don’t have a motorcycle. What diner do you mean?” the man asked.
Clarence wondered if this man had memory problems like his grandmother. “That’s okay. Sometimes people have trouble remembering things. My name is Clarence. What’s your name?”
“I’m Simon. If you explain where you came from, I’ll try to help you find your way back,” the man said. Simon sat down on the ground and scratched Harley behind the ears. Clarence could see that Harley knew Simon very well.
“I just came from Mrs. Fields’ house back over there. Mrs. Fields was in Walt’s Diner with us. She was the librarian at the Greenwich Public Library until she retired last month.”
“I think you’re confused about where you are. This isn’t Greenwich and there isn’t a house where you’re pointing.”
Clarence looked around and remembered he wasn’t able to see Mrs. Fields’ house from here. “I think I have a little bit of a problem. Harley, we aren’t in Greenwich anymore.”
“This is Edison. We do have a public library in Edison,” Simon said.
“I don’t understand what’s happening,” Clarence said.
“Sometimes you can understand things better if you retrace your steps. Try to remember what you’ve been doing today. Maybe if you talk through it, you can figure out what happened.”
“Okay….So my cousins were cooking pancakes with hardly any baking soda in the recipe, and Jane asked for a chemistry book….” Clarence explained all the details of the morning. “The pancakes were getting flatter and flatter and I took the failures out for Harley McFarley to eat and that’s when Harley knocked me down and after I fell, I saw the children jumping rope and I heard the rhyme about bamboo. They were saying, ‘What can you do with bamboo? Play peekaboo….’ Then I chased Harley McFarley and saw you,” Clarence said.
“You seem to be able to remember lots of details about your day,” Simon said.
“Yeah,” Clarence smiled a little. “I do remember, but some of this day has felt a little weird.”