"OH! Thanks a trillion jillion!"
"Wow! That's a lot of thanks, Dave!"
"Well, you're a lot of gal!"
"It's almost Easter! Scramble your eggs!"
Dave, in case you haven't heard me talk about him before, is a well known library patron. He's about 87 now, I think. Dave looks a bit like Mr. Magoo and used to come to the library a couple times a week to read various articles we had printed up for him and try to research his burning questions. Dave is also well known for the phone calls he makes to the library reference desk as he calls numerous times a day on an almost daily basis. At some point in the past, he was given the rule of being allowed to ask 4 questions per day. Sometimes he draws these out throughout the day, sometimes he has asked them all in 1 phone call by 9:07 a.m. If we didn't impose this limit, he'd call with 100 questions a day. Anyway, a little over a year ago Dave fell, hurt his neck, and has been living in a senior citizens home ever since. So he doesn't make it into the library anymore (which is really a shame as I know he'd be THRILLED to see the new building) but we're still the lucky recipients of a bevy of phone calls. He's become very hard of hearing, regularly breaks his hearing aids or just forgets to wear them, can be fairly looped up on drugs, and fails to wear his teeth frequently. This being said, while he can be EXTREMELY difficult to communicate with, Dave asks some of the most intelligent and interesting questions that span the most diverse topics anyone could imagine.
Some of these topics have included how phone lines work through the Rockies, determining the truth behind his extreme pro-life step-daughters stories (they're never right and often disgustingly provocative), hunting down the lyrics to a song from 1928 that he kinda remembers the tune to (always singing it to you when he asks), demanding the phone numbers for politicians he saw on tv so he can give them a piece of his damn mind!, also demanding the phone numbers for the star of different cable television shows so he can tell them what a fine job they're doing, and the transcript for that one show where he thinks they might have talked about Hilary Clinton but he's not sure and doesn't know if maybe it was on George Stephanopolis or maybe someone else's show but it was probably on on Sunday..., or a million other random things...
Dave can drive you nuts when you're screaming numbers into the phone to him or when he's just talking into the voicemail for 5 minutes because he doesn't realize it isn't a real person but there is not a single person in our department who doesn't become concerned about him if they haven't talked to him in a few days....
I don't know how I became Dave's person but I did. Everyone enjoys him but he and I have our own little friendship. Almost every single phone call between us ends with him saying "I love you!" which he usually follows up by immediately saying "oh wait, I shouldn't say that honey!" but I'm pretty sure that before it's too late, I'm going to just once answer "I love you too, Dave"
