Twilight zone to Main Street phone

(The following few paragraphs should be read in your best approximation of Rod Serling's voice.)

Submitted for your approval: A small town newspaperman and creature of habit.

His alarm goes off at the same time every morning. He arises 13 minutes later. He makes a pot of coffee and pours two glasses of vegetable juice. Twenty minutes after rising, he picks up his morning paper at the street.

As the morning progresses, deadlines are met. Stories are discussed. Complaints are listened to.

After lunch at home with his wife - soup in winter, a wrap or a salad in summer - he returns to the office, where he picks up the day's deposit and heads for the bank.

He has just stepped out of the bank onto sunny Main Street when the telephone rings.

The creature of habit looks up the street and down. No one is in sight. The telephone rings again.

Cue the theme from "The Twilight Zone." Do-do-do-do, do-do-do-do.

Okay, so that's a bit much.

I'm not truly that driven by habit.

But it kind of throws your routine into "The Twilight Zone" when you're alone on Main Street and a telephone rings.

In this case, it was the pay phone at the corner of Main and Court streets in Portland, right beside the Jay County Courthouse.

I looked around, saw nobody, and took a couple of steps toward the phone booth when the phone rang again.

The only sensible thing to do was answer it, so I did, explaining to a woman who was asking for a guy named Dave or Dan that she'd reached a pay phone on a public street.

Not surprisingly, she hung up. But when I hung up, I noticed something odd.

There, on the little shelf in the corner of the phone booth, was what looked like a carefully rolled marijuana cigarette. A joint.

This time, I didn't think of "The Twilight Zone." I thought of YouTube.

In this age when all of us seemed destined to appear as the stars of a mortifyingly embarrassing video on the Internet, I immediately assumed this was a prank of some sort. I looked around for cameras but didn't see any.

So what do I do? Do I pick up the "joint" and put it in my pocket, only to learn that someone with a long lens pointed my way is getting the whole thing on digital video?

Is this a Candid Camera style stunt? Or is it aimed at me personally?

For some reason, I thought of Portland police chief Bob Sours. He's the kind of guy with the right combination of technical savvy and a wicked sense of humor who might pull something like this off. He'd also get a great kick out of making the local newspaper publisher look silly. (That's nothing personal; it's simply the nature of police chiefs and publishers.)

But Bob didn't pop up from behind the General Shanks memorial to say, "Gotcha." There was still no one around.

Just the same, I left the "joint" where it was and went into the courthouse. I mentioned my find at the prosecutor's office, but investigator Curt Compton was busy in court.

After an unrelated interview, I was ready to head back to the office when I ran into Ralph Frazee, who in addition to being the head of the county's emergency management office is Pennville's town marshal.

Laughing and shaking his head, Ralph agreed to take a look. Sure enough, it was still there.

Ralph gave it a sniff. The verdict: Pipe tobacco.

Rod Serling would have been disappointed.[[In-content Ad]]