Who is that man? What is he really doing? What's in the darkness?

So my last post generated these questions from a gentle reader. :) I'll elaborate. The man is short - almost troll-like in appearance, with long scraggly grey hair and constant grey stubble no matter how recently he shaved. He has been doing this job for as long as he can remember, learning at the knees of his dad who did the job before him and his grandfather before that. But he is lonely - there being no son to follow in his footsteps, so he walks around in his room, feet making tap-tap-tap noises as he walks, turning the lights on at dusk and off at dawn. He goes outside as little as possible during the day as too much light makes him uncomfortable as does too much sky. In the corner of his room there is a cot where he sleeps.

The darkness has monsters. His job is to keep them at bay by turning the lights on when they start to stir, and turn them off again when sun's early light begins to chase them back to their hidey-holes for another day.

I was young when we lived in Toronto - not quite 13 when we left, and I had some quite interesting theories about the world around me. One of these, I still remember with a smile to this day. I needed to understand why it was that whole banks of streetlights came on at the same time. So I figured out that there was a room somewhere in downtown Toronto - a really big room - with nothing in it but rows and rows of switches on the wall. And there was a older man working there with a long stick that had an iron blade attached to it so it looked kind of like a really big T. His job was solely to walk about turning on banks of switches so that an entire street would light up at the same time.

It made sense then! :)

I also remember realizing that it was possible for it to be raining somewhere and not raining somewhere else! This realization didn't happen until after I moved to NB and I had the experience of being able to look over the countryside and see the rain falling but not being rained on. When one is small and lives in a city it is very hard to get that perspective!

I saw the movie Julie and Julia last night and while it made me itch to own another impossible cookbook (I already own the "Joy of Cooking"), it also made me realize how much I, too, yearn to have followers ... to be read by others ... to know that others are reading and appreciating my writing! It has been said that writing is a solitary art. How true.