Woodrow Stretcher: “Is Trump an Alien?”

Its been months since I ran into Woodrow Stretcher at the Home Despot. The garden supply section seems be the main social gathering place during the corona virus epidemic. And, of course Home Despot is Atlanta- based so you wouldn’t expect Governor Kemp to put it on the quarantine list. Just to remind you, Woodrow Stretcher is the metal detector operator at the Capitol in Atlanta, or maybe just one of the operators or maybe just says he works there. I can never know for sure. But he is an expert on anything you can learn by watching Amazon and You Tube. Woodrow is a self- proclaimed authority on UFOs. With You Tube and the streaming services to inform us, every man or woman can become an expert on something. With members of the state legislature staying home due to the covid epidemic and most of the UFO meetings and field trips canceled (Cairo, Georgia is said to be a “hot spot” for UFO sightings) , Woodrow has been sitting at home binge watching all two hundred and seventeen episodes of Ancient Aliens on Netflix.

Woodrow took me by surprise between the stacks of cypress mulch and the stall filled with manure when I ran into him at Home Despot. Like most of the employees there, he was not wearing a mask and I hoped he might not recognize me since I was wearing a medical mask as well as a homemade second mask made from a gym sock.

He looked around as if hoping to avoid detection and shoved a pamphlet into my hands. Fortunately I was wearing a pair of those blue latex gloves. “Don’t share this with anybody,” he said, and he couldn’t resist the opportunity to tell me what was in the pamphlet he had written. By the way, although he is a Trump supporter he was not, for once, wearing his MAGA basball cap. I should have known something new was grinding his mental gears.

“Trump is an alien,” Woodrow announced without wasting time on the usual pleasantries.

“That can’t be,” I replied, “he is always trying to keep aliens out of the country, building walls and rounding up undocumented Mexicans.”

Stretcher reacted with an irritated shaking of his head of frizzy red hair, “That’s not the kind of alien I am talking about. I mean the ones in UFOs, the ones who came to earth thousands of years ago and keep sending really wise aliens to help us out–like the one who gave Einstein the formula for making the atomic bombs we dropped on Japan. Or, the ones who came to save the Israelites from the Egyptian Pharaoh and sent the Ten Commandments down with Moses. The ones who showed the Egyptians how to build the pyramids and showed Joshua how to blow the rams horns and carry the Ark of the Covenant around and around Jericho until the walls fell down. I’ll bet you did not know that the ark was a secret nuclear weapon.” Stretcher’s arm gestures and wild hair coupled with his high-pitched voice were beginning to attract attention from people wearing face masks. They were pulling on their children’s arms and beginning to ease on out of earshot.

I was afraid to ask a question or make a comment. That might only hype Woodrow up. So, Woodrow started making up his own questions for me. “Think about how smart Trump is. And he still talks like he doesn’t know English, like he has trouble pronoucing the words he reads on the the teleprompter. And, he hires all these really smart people to run different branches of the governement, people we never heard of before — and then fires them a week later because they are not as smart as he. How do you explain that?” Well, several answers came to mind but I thought better than to offer them.

“What do you think he told the dictator of North Korea that scared him so bad he started shooting up dummy missles with no atomic bombs on board.” That one stumped me for real. “And, he doesn’t have to worry about Coronavirus because he’s always saying its something the Democrats made up to get Joe Biden elected president.”

“But mostly, you just have to look at him. He’s wearing a disguise and makeup. Nobody’s hair is that color and who do you know with an orange complexion. And his hands! People have stopped noticing how small his hands are. And smart. He’s really smart and has said so many times, like his intelligence is being beamed by secret communication from some advanced civilization.” Stretcher was just warming up his engine I feared, as a few very different looking people without masks seemed to be moving in closer to hear what Woodrow was saying. I was caught in the middle now, as I said between mulch and manure.

“The Corona Virus! You know that ordinary colds are a form of corona virus. Think about this. I just watched the old movie”War of the Worlds” on You Tube. You must have seen this. The aliens came to conquer the earth and their big tripods fired ray guns that wiped out whole cities all over the world. What saved the earth? It was the common cold. This is why President Trump pulled out all the stops to fight the corona virus. He shut down the whole economy (except for takeout food service like Chic-fil-a, grocery stores and places like Home Despot).

Thank goodness the guys at Home Despot brought in one of those fork lifts and ordered us out of this aisle so they could restock the dwindling supply of garden soil and mulch. I backed up for the forklift to pass and made my self scarce down a side aisle through the fertilizers and pesticides.