If you’re going to take note of the strange things people do, say, or wear, you must begin with a point of comparison. For a long time my standard of strangeness came from a bar somewhere in Bavaria in 1975. While there and sober, I noticed a strange-looking man at the bar and had to pretend to look at the collection of mugs behind him to get a closer look at the man. He was animatedly talking to friends who seemed to think he was normal, even though the bad toupee he wore was not really a toupee but a tanned hide rabbit skin he had cut and somehow molded to fit his head, complete with sideburns. This was in July. It was not a hat. He had combed a “part” into the top left side.

Ten years later, I acquired a new point of comparison after I had moved to the Chicago suburbs. I had heard that good fishing from the shore of Lake Michigan could be had from the Tower Road Pier because it was near a power plant that discharged warm water into the lake and attracted big fish and lots of perch early in the season. On my first trip I felt a little out of place with my medium-weight rod when a saw a man at the railing looking out at the expanse of beautiful blue-green water, and his “gear” consisted of a five gallon bucket, a hockey puck, a fire extinguisher, and a PVC pipe about three inches in diameter and four feet long. I rigged up and began casting while keeping a careful eye on the more experienced Lake Michigan fisherman. First he tied the end of a coil of line in his bucket to a screw eye embedded in the hockey puck. Then he baited a good ten yards of the line with worms and crickets. Next he stuffed the hockey puck down the tube and used some type of coupling device to attach the tube to the fire extinguisher. Finally with the same care he would use to aim a mortar, he braced the tube against the side of his foot, hit the release valve on the fire extinguisher, and watched proudly as the high pressure in his fire extinguisher blasted the hockey puck and its trailing, baited line several hundred yards out into the lake. No one could have cast that far with a rod. His strange method was a thing of wonder. In an hour, he retrieved his line hand over hand, coiling it carefully in his bucket, and eventually taking in at least a dozen nice-sized perch. I caught nothing.

I expected to see more strangeness when I moved to Madison where just under one-fifth of the population of 250,000 is college students whose first breaking away from parents means “anything goes,” and I have not been disappointed. I have seen a student riding to class on a unicycle, beer hats (not the insignia, the actual beer), kids walking through snow in shorts and flip-flops, and one young woman walking to class in the equivalent of a tasseled lamp shade – a very short lamp shade. I have seen dogs taken for a walk on a leash with a blinking safety bike light attached to the dog. In the dark, you couldn’t see the person, but the dog was safe. Last week I saw a young woman struggling to climb Highland Avenue on her bike with toddler’s trailer attached to the back. As a big fan of babies, I peeked into her trailer to see – a very content spaniel being given a ride. It was a different woman from the one I saw last winter trudging through a foot of snow with one of those baby-carrying snugglies on her chest and long-eared dachshund peeking out of the warm wrap. I have seen bikes with neon rims, bikes with four-inch wide snow tires, and cars entirely covered with bumper stickers, most in the same category as “I used to think I was indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.” O-kay.

Two other things have made appearances because Madison is a college town. Move-in days for probably 10,000 or so new students are usually a Sunday and Monday at the end of August, with move-out day for those changing residences a few days before. During that time, the city runs extra garbage pickup routes because the curbs are piled high with old mattresses, mousy couches, computer desks in various stages of disassembly, desktop computers, printers, tangles of router wiring, deflated footballs, basketballs and soccer balls, loft beds, (did I say mattresses?) and UW cafeteria trays stolen in the winter to serve as sleds down the hill outside Kronshage Hall. If you can imagine an army in full-panic retreat, jettisoning everything they cannot eat, you have a good image of what the Madison curbs look like. The locals call it “Happy Hippy Christmas,” and except for the mattresses and infectious couches, an incoming freshman need not buy anything at IKEA to get ready for school if he can drive around with a pickup truck.

Driving around, though, is something of a challenge. More than once, I have seen wide-eyed parents and a freshman in a car from Pennsylvania or Minnesota driving the wrong way on one-way University Avenue, Gorham, Johnson, Gilman, Carroll, Main, Pinckney, or Mifflin. I have been that parent. Twice. The fathers look bewildered, the mothers agog and the freshmen in the back seat – terrified. Couple that yearly Running-of-the-Freshman-Parent-Drivers with the fact that Madison, especially near and on campus, is a bicycle and Vespa scooter town, and the result is something like a county fair figure-8 race. Imagine such a race with several overloaded U-Halls, four mini-vans, two motorcycles, a tractor, six bicycles, four speeding pizza delivery cars, seven joggers, and a snowmobile. It’s not quite a demolition derby, but there are a lot of close calls to keep things interesting. Fortunately, the locals have learned to watch out for the lost, confused, wide-eyed parents of freshmen. I have seen police cars screech to a halt in front of them, lights flashing, in an attempt to protect the hapless parents. Usually the police don’t use their sirens then; I assume they have learned that a loud siren only makes things worse. Apparently, there are quantum stages of panic.

I saw one parent unfortunately heading east on University Avenue, realize his mistake too late and pull over the curb and across the bike path to park diagonally on the sidewalk and wait for the police. The father’s head was on the steering wheel; the mother looked like that painting by Edouard Munch called “The Scream,” and the freshman girl in the back seat was crying but looked strangely relieved. Unfortunately, my phone was not in picture mode at the time.

Another danger spot is near State Street, because cars are allowed to cross it at a dozen places with some six-way intersections, but no cars are allowed to drive down State Street in either direction. Students there usually flag the parents down before someone gets hurt. At many intersections in town there are canisters of orange flags that pedestrians can use to flag down motorists. Pedestrians are supposed to have right of way on all crosswalks, but …. Sometimes I think they should do away with the flags and just set up barrels full of water balloons. Rotten tomatoes might also work. If my car got hit by a water balloon or a tomato, I would stop.

Strange life is not always related to driving or schools. On July 4, I rode my bike along a nice path to Blackhawk Golf Course, where there was a wonderful fireworks display after a lively Sousa concert by the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra and a chorus of the National Anthem. After an hour-long booming display and a finale that lit the hillside, several thousand spectators packed up camp chairs, blankets and coolers to make our way across the 8th fairway, a ditch, and a railroad crossing inn the dark to parking lots and the bike path. Most of us used flashlights to get back. Directly in the path of almost everyone near the railroad crossing was a couple on a blanket, making out as passionately as anything I’ve seen … anywhere. They did not stop when the crowd split into two streams to go around them. Giggling children did not stop them. A dozen flashlights aimed at them at one time did not distract them. Two dozen “Oh, my Gods” did not stop them. They were not even distracted by a snickering teens who paused to applaud them. Ah, youth.

On my way back home along the bike path in darkness only occasionally lit by solar-powered path lights, I saw a wavering light coming at me, but it was too high for a bike light, and I couldn’t believe some giant was shakily just learning to ride at night. When I got closer, I saw an ordinary teen steering her wobbly bike with one hand, and holding up her smart phone to light a dim way with her other hand, not on flashlight mode but on end-of-concert tribute mode. It was a bad idea for at least a half dozen reasons. I hope she made it home.

Last week, while traveling through the east side of Madison, known unofficially as Hippie Central, I noticed for the first time that some knitting fiend had somehow attached knit squares into eight-feet-high tubes around trees on the parkway. I don’t know if the trees were embarrassed by their bad sweaters, but I was embarrassed for them. I heard from our daughter-in-law that the same decorations exist somewhere in Evanston, Illinois, just off the campus of Northwestern University. Lately I’ve heard this phenomenon exists all around the country. See below. Those poor trees.

Speaking of trees… Ann and I took a walk to a nearby coffee shop this morning. Unfortunately, Madison is fighting the emerald ash borer these days with an added surcharge on our utility bill each month of about two dollars to fund chemical treatment for threatened trees. We’ve seen stapled messages on some trees around town announcing an applied treatment. For some trees, it’s too late. What can be done with the remains of a stately old tree? Here’s one solution we saw. The pink flamingo is added for a touch of … kitsch?

Dempster Avenue in Evanston is an amalgam of many interesting cultures. Its shops range from temples to hookah lounges, from pita house restaurants to hot dog emporiums. During my last drive, I saw a very smartly-dressed Hasidic Jew on the sidewalk in a neatly pressed black suit, white shirt, tie, long curls, and wide-brimmed hat. His black shoes shone like ebony as he – wait for it – pushed himself along the sidewalk on a scooter. I don’t know what the typical Hasidic woman would think, but I thought he looked pretty cool.

I hope that this post will not end with me. If you choose to respond, please attach your favorite, “If you think you’ve seen everything…” I can’t wait to read about the rich tapestry of craziness we are collectively creating, not that I’ve ever done anything strange, you understand, except maybe for that one night outside Waterloo when several of us young campers thought roasting a chicken sounded good and, um, never mind.