A man was walking along, deep in thought, lost in worries about this and that and another thing, when suddenly he realized he had stumbled into a wonderland.
Everything was bright colors and magic buses and this can’t be real, but it was real enough and whimsically nonsensical.
“You there!” cried a friendly enough looking police officer. “Why are you dressed so drably? Why aren’t you smiling? Are you quite all right?”
“I’m not sure,” said the man. “Where is this?”
“Ah, it’s another one,” the officer said gently. “You were walking along all worried, right?”
“I don’t see how that’s anyone’s —“
“Right, right, right,” smiled the officer. “That’s absolutely correct, it’s not my business. Well enough. You just didn’t notice you’d crossed Whimsy Avenue. No worries, you’re going to be fine, move along.”
And the officer walked away. Now the man looked around and saw that, no matter where he looked, he saw something impossibly amazing.
“Here now, watch where you’re going,” said a cat with a cockney accent in a tuxedo.
“Woof,” said a friendly dog who sniffed at his hand and looked around for balls.
Above, the sky was orange — not the majestic orange of a setting sun, but the orange of an orange (you know, the fruit) or construction paper.
“I can show you the way to Normal,” huffed a gray-haired woman in glasses, “but you won’t like it there, not ever again.”
And that was the beginning of a beautiful friendship. It seemed the woman had been a tense old thing until one day she happened upon Whimsy Avenue — although she found some people called it Whimsy Street, for some reason — and she never looked back, although she did still tend to fuss about.
“Don’t mind me, I’m just an old fuss bucket. No harm intended,” she would tell people.
There may be some tales to tell about the man and the fussy gray-haired woman on Whimsy Avenue, if I can find my way back there myself …
