Flailing his arms, the little man threw himself upon one of the newly planted rose bushes, trampling it with his feet. Or so it appeared. I was about to yank him back indignantly when I realized that his tattered shoes were adroit in avoiding the bush.
"I'm just stamping the--hic!--stamping the dirt down," he explained. "The roses like it better that way. Hic! They like things just so. They have their own little idiosyncrasies, you know."
"Even the well-educated, well-balanced ones?" Then, afraid that sounded too flippant, I said, "But what are your idiosyncrasies?"
Oliv seized a hoe from his car, leaned upon it, and said, "Look at me. I'm--hic!--the man with the hoe, stolid and stunned, brother to the--hic!--the ox."
I must have looked rather vague, for he explained, "That's from one of the poems I use--hic!--to teach my journalism classes."
He began chopping at the ground. "One of my peculiarities," he said, "is that I can't resist buying the bottles of things the--hic!--apothecaries sell. Those rows and rows of neatly labeled bottles on the shelves in drug stores--hic--they do something to me. I don't know what it is exactly, but practically all the money I earn doing gardening--hic--and odd jobs goes into the apothecaries' pockets. You ought to see my domicile--it's just like being in a--hic!--a drug store. Every shelf and drawer is loaded with bottles of pills and tablets and--hic!--capsules."
"Well, that's--interesting," I remarked, not being able to think of a more satisfactory adjective. "Sort of a hobby."
"But that isn't the sum total of my idiosyncrasies," he said, his face, under its thatch of white hair topped by his frayed cap, turning a mottled pink. He stopped, thrusting a small plant into the trench he had dug.
"No, I--hic!--regret to say, that isn't all," he went on. "It's--well, it's women. I can't resist them either."
I clicked my tongue sympathetically. "Lots of men are like that," I comforted him.