Lamont B. Dumont
 Lamont B. Dumont was
born somewhere. He is certain of neither the location nor the date, since he was very
young at the time. He would have asked his mother about it, but she left home before he
was born. Asking his father proved futile, since the elder Dumont’s illiteracy was
exceeded only by his itinerancy. His father was a practitioner of the art of vegetable
magnetism, which required extensive travel via astral projection. The last time Lamont saw
his father was just prior to an ill-advised departure undertaken too quickly after a
psychic pedicure.
Needless to say the dimensional stress exerted on the Dumont domicile by this event left
it looking like it had been designed by Picasso and built by Dali. Both the front and back
doors were visible from the street and the back yard, though neither was of much
use in a three-dimensional space influenced by Newtonian gravity. The local authorities
didn’t see any point in subscribing to the more expensive and difficult to follow
Einsteinium version, since the county rarely, if ever approached the speed of light. (That
being the only place where those two laws disagree to any significant degree.) Lamont
appeared before a special meeting of the Board of Frozen Cheeseholders to plead his case
(as well as that of 20th Century physics). They were unswayed by his
impassioned explanation that the moon was not traveling in an elliptical orbit around the
Earth, but rather falling in a straight line through a portion of space curved into an
ellipse by the Earth’s gravitational pull.
Two of the esteemed board members fell asleep, and the others said it was
interesting, but so hard to understand that it gave them all headaches. Besides, the
Newtonians had offered them a really good deal on their Law of Gravity, but to get the
best rate they were locked into a long-term contract with  substantial
penalties if they terminated. On top of that, the Einsteinium version was in German, and
the cost of the translation alone would drive the property rates up enough to cause a tax
revolt. They were all sympathetic that he couldn’t get into his house, but reminded
him that adding an extra dimension to his house had about the same tax consequences as
adding an extra bathroom, so his taxes would be going up.
So, while Lamont found himself homeless on a practical basis, from a tax
standpoint he had upgraded. Counting himself fortunate to have been playing in the compost
heap rather than in the kitchen preparing a peanut butter and naval jelly sandwich at the
time of the transmogrification, he set out to find fame and fortune, but decided early on
that he would settle for lunch.
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Dumont at
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Lamont at Sweet Junes 1998
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