“The strangest thing happened,” said the voicemail message. It’s Dave, my building manager.

He calls a lot these days. “Are you around?” he asks. “Can you come up?”

I got a similar call a few days ago. Dave needed help inspecting his trashcan, which he claimed had moved in the night. “When I went to bed, it was flush against the wall,” he explained, “and this morning, I found it like this.” The trashcan sat six inches askew from its corner.

“It’s been happening regularly,” Dave said. “I suspect the paranormal.”

He’d already canvassed for opinions from everyone else in the building,

including my girlfriend, who bought the ghost idea and was now scared of poltergeists infiltrating our refuse as well.

I suggested the culprit might be one of Dave’s three smelly, grouchy, and huge cats, but Dave replied that, No, this was impossible, why would my cats move my trashcan?

Having settled that brief whimsy, Dave stared at the scene. After a long silence, he looked up and added: “It even moves during the day. A bold ghost indeed.”

I climb the stairs, expecting another development with Dave’s self-ambulating kitchen trash -- perhaps a cryptic message spelled out with orange rinds or some other supernatural tell-tale.

Instead, I find Dave seated calmly in his wicker chair, looking at a potted orchid.

Instead, I find Dave seated calmly in his wicker chair, looking at a potted orchid.
“I had a visitor today,” he says. Dave is recovering from leukemia and has received a lot of well-wishers recently. That’s one of the reasons he calls a lot, for help with errands, for company, for assistance with garbage-loving ghosts.

This visitor, Dave explains, was different. It was a mysterious woman, he says, “elegant and attractive but older,” whom he’d met at a gas station two months ago, just before his second round of chemotherapy.

She’d complimented him on his vintage Range Rover and his baldness, which she said she found sexy. Dave, an older bachelor who spends a lot of his time with his three smelly, grouchy and huge cats,

was instantly intrigued by this strange woman, with her shiny black Mercedes and fur stole and espadrilles and bold approach among the pumps. They chatted briefly, traded contact info – Barbara was her name -- and each went on their way.

Then, today, out of the blue, she calls. When Dave responds to her pleasantry “how are things?” by explaining that he was in fact recovering from cancer, Barbara sounded concerned and said she wanted to come over right away.

“She brought me this orchid,” Dave says. “A nice gesture, since I don’t know her at all.”

Barbara arrived at his apartment, in fur and fancy shoes just as before.

Dave thought it was a classy if dated touch that she wore a silk scarf monogrammed in elegant script. She’d been abroad, she said, in Europe.

She asked about his leukemia and remission. Somehow, the topic of fate came up.

And that’s when Barbara told Dave about her exciting new investment opportunity: “This may not be the right time, but…”

Dave picked up the orchid as he explained that Barbara started telling him how she had hooked up with a group of very canny investors, and these guys were working on something so exciting that she couldn’t contain herself, she just had to let Dave in on it.

“It seems these investors,” Dave said, “have located a certain snowman.” He gazed at the potted plant’s delicate petals, striated from yellow to purple. “And this snowman is capable of bench-pressing 400 pounds.”

Like the abominable snowman?

“Not really. It’s a regular snowman.”

But, like, a guy in a snowman suit or something.

“No,” Dave says again. “She says he’s made of snow, with a carrot nose and a little top hat and everything.” Barbara had enthusiastically reported how truly incredible it was to see a snowman lifting weights, and that her investor group thought the world would pay good money to do so.

That’s why they’re putting together a touring variety show with the snowman as the lead act. It’s going to be huge.

Entertainment tonight is interested in covering it.

Before I can assimilate the multivariate irrationality of this information, Dave gets into the “investment opportunity,” which revolves around the global territorial rights to the weightlifting snowman show.

“Barbara,” Dave says, “got in on the ground floor. She bought the southwest – Arizona, Utah, Nevada.” The rest of the United States got snapped up right away, of course. “But luckily, she said, Indonesia is still wide open. There was also a package deal for Haiti and Dominican Republic, but that’s more expensive.”

Dave’s seemed a bit vulnerable recently, so I start to worry he might have fallen for the old weight-lifting snowman scam,

except there is no such scam, because it makes no sense at all, since a snowman is an inanimate object,

and has arms made of tree branches and can’t lift anything much less free weights, all of which I point out,

only to have Dave respond, “I know it’s crazy. But I have to say I felt a strange connection to this woman.”

Let’s think about the implications, I say. Where would such a snowman come from? Did he roll himself up into three balls

and find his own top hat and carrot nose?

How did the investors “locate” him? Were they just driving through the winterine forest in black Suburbans searching for variety show ideas

when they spied the snowman doing solitary reps with old logs and they all high-fived each other and said: “Bingo!”?

More importantly, how did the investors convince the snowman to come with them? Does the snowman have ears? Speak English? Understand contracts?

Assume Entertainment Tonight puts the snowman on TV. Wouldn’t the more important outcome not be good publicity for Barbara’s variety show but the unprecedented implications for all of science, philosophy and religion?

The entire calendar would have to be re-organized to pre- and post-snowman --

That’s when Dave says that...

he wrote her a check for $30,000.

(Sound of brain exploding.)

“I’ve been re-examining things since the chemotherapy,” Dave explains with pensive pauses. “You know -- why we’re here and what does it all mean and all that.” Before the diagnosis, he says, he lived conservatively, never taking risks.

“Now, it’s a new horizon.” He realizes it was a strange decision, but felt at that moment like he was part of some cosmic plan. “It seemed I’d known this woman all my life.”

I go home and google variants of bench pressing and snowman.

There are no results on point. An absolute Google void. Strangely, it seems that no human being has ever before conceived of a snowman that can lift weights.

I wonder if Dave dreamed the whole thing. But there was the orchid. And the precise details, like the monogrammed scarf. And, of course, the check stub.

The next morning, Dave calls again: “I cancelled the check.” Dave’s romance with risk was short-lived.

A night’s sleep helped him decide that if the universe has plans for him, it’s probably not to give this woman Barbara $30,000 to bring a supernatural snowman on tour through Southeast Asia.

“And besides,” he finally concludes, “how would they keep him from melting?”