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You fell for it. The oldest trick. In the book? Maybe. You lifted the hat that was sitting there on the mailbox. The hat: sad, silent, lonely, as if forgotten or abandoned. Disconsolate, like a child who thinks his parents have left without him and won’t return? Maybe. And out from under the hat leapt the frog that had been trapped there. It hopped twice and rested on the edge of the mailbox. Seemingly about to topple.
"Huh?" you stammered, dropping the hat into the gutter in disgust. At the frog.
t this point, what could I do but shrug as the frog began rapidly to become less froglike? It paled. It grew. It became you - or your likeness. As you shrank.
I chuckled at your look of surprise. Inconsiderate? Unfeeling? Perhaps. But it was comic, after all. Had you been in my shoes.... Then finally, of course, you were a frog, a pretty one as the other had been. And the other was you, even wearing your clothes. It stepped on the hat, crushing it.
Then it grabbed my hat off of my head. My favorite hat. My grandfather’s hat. I didn’t have time to stop it. It dropped the hat on top of you. What could I do? I slipped a newspaper under you and my grandfather’s hat and lifted you onto the mailbox. Then the frog and I went to the movies.
So. What’s done is done. I always told you not to take your life for granted. I never took you for granted. But maybe you’ll end up becoming someone better. Who knows? Who will pick up my grandfather’s hat? Not I. Not the frog, anyway. Maybe that funny man over there. He’d be all right to be, I guess. I guess.
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