Some Poor Old Guy

Some poor old guy from the Mennonite Home calls our house at irregular intervals. He asks for somebody who doesn't live here, and from what I know of the previous owners, didn't live here in at least the last fourteen years. Probably he's slipped a digit somewhere. I mean along with the slipped cog upstairs. I try not to imagine really depressing scenarios like a son or daughter deliberately giving him a wrong phone number to avoid him. I am always very amiable with him, and explain he has a wrong number, but after a few weeks go by, he calls again. You can tell he's confused, but he's always polite. If I see the number on the caller i.d., I try to pick up, and every time I pretend as though he hasn't called before, because I figure he probably doesn't know, and if I tell him, he might get discouraged. But today I missed his call. It sounds funny to say I missed it. As though I was supposed to answer it. Sometimes I think it's one of those Twilight Zone episodes and it's really me in the future, but I doubt I'd end up in a Mennonite home with just that accent. Although, who knows. Stranger things have happened. Sometimes I suspect he knows he has the wrong number, and sometimes I think he keeps a whole list of wrong numbers and dials them for something to do, but then I think the universe can't be that cruel. Don't they have game rooms? Televisions? Sex with candy stripers? Eventually, he'll stop calling and then I'll feel really bad. If I think of him, I mean. Which will be accidental. Like his calls. If I were a person with mental wherewithal, I would take initiative and try to help him in some way. But you know how messed up that story would end. Once I tried to adopt a homeless Laotian woman when I was ten. True story. She was crying on a street corner. I was riding my bike. The one with a flag on it. How patarded is that? My parents did not let me keep her. The confused leading the confuseder. When I talk to him now, I sort of visualize him as a porcelain Dresden elephant several hundred years old with hairline fractures everywhere. He probably put a minus sign next to my name on his list today, because I missed his call. I'm already feeling as though I'm failing a class I never signed up for. What would Moral Orel do?