W. Bruce Cameron

My Neighbor Tom

I’ve been good friends with my neighbor Tom ever since he got his new bass boat. He and I have spent many pleasant hours sitting in that boat, sharing memories and speculating on how much fun it will be if we ever get the boat out of his garage.

Tom purchased the boat the way most men make their important decisions: completely on impulse. As he tells it, it wasn’t his fault — his system was overwhelmed by all the watercraft at the boat show, until he simply had to buy a boat before he suffered severe psychological trauma. (His wife Emily points out that he could have avoided the trauma entirely if he hadn’t voluntarily gone to the boat show in the first place, but Tom dismisses this argument because he had been given free tickets.)

The new boat is something of a sore point between Tom and Emily, because she obviously doesn’t understand how important it is to a man to be able to show all his friends what a great toy he owns. Tom has also confided that Emily is jealous of the boat because she’d rather use the garage for other things, like her car.

“I have a hobby, and she doesn’t,” Tom explains, sitting in his boat in such a fashion that he can see a substantial portion of his big-screen TV through the garage’s back-door window.

Some people are surprised that a woman like Emily would be married to someone like Tom, who is often described as being “a little rough around the edges.” Once you get to know him, though, you realize that Tom hasn’t had any edges since he was 16 years old. He’s pretty much round everywhere. Also, Tom does sweet things for his wife, like buying Emily her own personal life preserver for when she joins him in the garage. A lot of men would just hand their wives one of the life preservers out of the pile.

Tom is an innovator in the sense that he is always coming up with amazingly successful ideas, though unfortunately always after someone else does. Bottled water, for example: Tom mourns the day he first held a plastic container of H2O in his hand.

“I could have been in my basement, filling up bottles and selling them for a buck apiece,” Tom laments.

“Now all the big bottling companies are in on the act, and it is too late.”

“You missed that opportunity by a hair,” I agree. I am very much in favor of Tom capitalizing on one of his ideas someday and getting rich, because then who knows the kinds of things he’ll buy for his garage.

“Or Internet search,” he continues.

This is a new one, so I look at him. “What do you mean?”

“You read how much Google is worth? What if I’d thought to say to people, ‘Hey, instead of paying all that money to Google, why not send your questions to me?’ That way, we finally win one for the little guy.”

“But those search engines are free,” I point out.

“OK, but I couldn’t do all that work for nothing,” Tom objects.

“That’s fair,” I say finally. “So people would ask you a question like, ‘Who was the sixth president of the United States,’ and you’d say ...”

“I’m not very good at history,” Tom admits.

“So you’d say, ‘I don’t know,’”

“At least I’d be honest,” Tom tells me.

“That’s important,” I agree.

“Or if they wanted to wait, I could look it up. Take me a couple of days, though — I’m pretty busy.”

Emily eventually comes out to see what we are doing, which she mispronounces as “nothing.” She apparently doesn’t understand that sometimes men just need to get together and speculate on how successful they might have been if only they hadn’t been too busy, or how much fun we would have with the boat if we ever had time to get it out on the lake.

She does seem to understand Tom, though, and even put on the life jacket for a few minutes because it seemed to make him so happy.

She’s the best decision Tom ever made.

To write Bruce Cameron, visit his Website at http://www.wbrucecameron.com. To find out more about Bruce Cameron and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at http://www.creators.com.

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