Henderson is a retired Trooper who worked the road for 30 years. Now in retirement, he meets most days with a bunch of cronies, two of them also retired Troopers. They meet at the City Cafe on Main Street weekday mornings at 9:00 a.m.

They talk about guy things — mostly about how things were 30 years ago and how weird the world seems to be today.

This is a September morning and it’s still plenty hot. Henderson is waiting for the cool days of fall. This must be his lucky day. A car pulls out of a diagonal parking space directly across the street from the City Cafe. Henderson signals and pulls into the slot. He puts money in the meter to cover an hour and heads for his morning coffee.

He’s the first to arrive, but three others soon fill the booth. They call themselves the Geezer Patrol. The conversation isn’t always stimulating, but that’s okay. A favorite term among them is: "I’m just glad to be here." They swap stories about the old days and tell occasional lies.

After about an hour, the group begins to break up. Two of them have doctor appointments. Henderson teases them: "Every name in your address book has an ‘M.D.’ behind it."

"What did he say?" the guy asks.

"I don’t know," says another, "something about a doctor."

Henderson crosses Main Street then glances at the parking meter as he gets into his car. It’s 9:55 a.m. so he turns on the car radio to catch a few minutes of the "oldies but goodies" radio station.

Henderson doesn’t notice, but traffic on his side of Main is backing up because there’s a car stopped, waiting to pull into his parking spot.

Finally, the town policeman walks over to Henderson and ask, "What are you waiting for Stick? Can’t you see traffic is backed up?"

"I’ll pull out in a minute," Henderson says, "but right now I’m waiting for the meter to run out."