Meet Ted
"When truth gets very deep, beneath a thousand years of sleep, time demands a turn around, and once again the truth is found" - Donovan
Meet Ted.
Just last month, Ted reached the ripe old age of eighty-one. The people at his home brought him a cake, sang happy birthday, and even blew out the candles for him.
Ted can’t remember any of their names, but they’re good kids, and they don’t mind if he only ever calls them “son” or “sweetheart”.
Ted can’t remember exactly how long he’s been living at Peaceful Pines, but he doesn’t worry about it. All he knows is that it’s nicer than the place he used to live, and that the folks there are just about as nice and nice can be.
The staff at Peaceful Pines are so nice, in fact, that they sometimes let Ted use one of the community iPads to check the football scores and read the headlines. But Ted doesn’t care too much for sports or news.
He doesn’t recognize any of the players anymore, and all the bad news about the war over in England just makes him sad.
So instead, Ted watches YouTube videos.
Last month, Ted spent the evening of his birthday watching a two hour nature documentary, on animals with strange habits and abilities.
He learned about how dolphins pass around pufferfish in the ocean, and get high on their toxins. He also witnessed a demonstration of how horned lizards can shoot blood out of their eyes using tiny, pressurized glands.
A few days after that, when it was next his turn to use the community iPad, Ted watched a documentary on Lord Frederick Stanley, and his involvement in establishing ice hockey as Canada’s national sport. Ted loved hockey, but he’d watch just about any documentary he could find. Because they helped him remember all the things he used to know.
But then came the day that Ted found a very frightening looking documentary, about a man it called - ‘The Rialto Ripper’.