After Tim had witnessed the raccoon and his red carpet stroll, there was only one person left in the apartment for me to convince -- Loren (previously labeled by Tim as 'Mike's girlfriend'). Like Tim, Loren had, at some point, decided that I tell tall tales. This makes very little sense to me. If a young man is driving home, to Ohio, with his dad from New York City after a particularly worthless career fair and a particularly special George W. Bush press conference (The one in which he dropped such pearls as "Sadaam is an evil man. He gassed his own people." And, "After all, this is the man who tried to kill my dad.") and they stop at a rest stop in Pennsylvania at one in the morning out of pure exhaustion and there happens to be an Amish Family who's also stopped at that rest stop and if that Amish Family happens to have a goat with them, how is that the aforementioned young man's fault? Or, if the same young man is at a secluded beach and he sees two sharks bounding in and out of the water and if one of the sharks decides it wants to leap out of the water and bite the fin off of the other shark, how is that a tall tale? It is, I would argue, the wonder of life that the magic of life happens in front of some people's eyes more than others. It's a paradox then, possibly a case of serendipity, that Loren had a more magical encounter with the raccoon than both me and Tim.

It was dark outside. Tim and I were studying teenage American culture, i.e. watching "Next" or "Parental Control" on MTV inside the apartment. Loren excused herself and headed down the stairwell to smoke a cigarette on the stoop outside our building. When she got to the stoop, she prepared to sit down but then heard a commotion in the bushes. She held her ground, stayed ready...and out from the bushes came...the raccoon. He looked into Loren's eyes and held his ground equally as well as she did. (Later, Loren would describe his look as a look of "longing" - but longing for what? The racccoon already ruled the neighborhood.) And then, the unthinkable happened. The raccoon began to approach her. This behavior is grotesquely unlike the behavior of normal raccoons, who tend to flee at the sight of humans faster than Superman, who himself is faster than a speeding bullet. Unwilling to confront the raccoon in such a closed space, or perhaps, unwilling to confront the raccoon at all, Loren bolted backed inside the stairwell. In this case, the raccoon had triumphed. He had made a statement - he, not Loren, owned the territory surrounding our apartment building.

It wasn't until days later, maybe not even until the moment that I wrote this sentence that I wondered, "Maybe the raccoon wasn't trying to provoke a confrontation. Maybe he wanted to start a dialogue. Or maybe he just wanted a smoke."