An old man came in. He said he wanted a glass of milk. The waitress got one for him. He drank it and put a nickel in a slot machine on his way out. Then he shook his head.

After we finished eating, Uncle Jarv had to go over to the post office and send a postcard. We walked over there and it was just a small building, more like a shack than anything else. We opened the screen door and went in.

There was a lot of post office stuff: a counter and an old clock with a long drooping hand like a moustache under the sea, swinging softly back and forth, keeping time with time.

There was a large nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe on the wall. The first one I had ever seen in a post office. She was lying on a big piece of red. It seemed like a strange thing to have on the wall of a post office, but of course I was a stranger in the land.

The postmistress was a middle-aged woman, and she had copied on her face one of those mouths they used to wear during the 1920s. Uncle Jarv bought a postcard and filled it up on the counter as if it were a glass of water.

It took a couple of moments. Halfway through the postcard Uncle Jarv stopped and glanced up at Marilyn Monroe. There was nothing lustful about his looking up there. She just as well could have been a photograph of mountains and trees.

I don’t remember whom he was writing to. Perhaps it was to a friend or a relative. I stood there staring at the nude photograph of Marilyn Monroe for all I was worth. Then Uncle Jarv mailed the postcard. ‘Come on,’ he said.

We went back to the house where the bears were, but they were gone. ‘Where did they go?’ somebody said.

A lot of people had gathered around and they were all talking about the missing bears and were kind of looking for the bears all over the place.

‘They’re dead,’ somebody said, trying to be reassuring, and pretty soon we were looking inside the house, and a woman went through the closets, looking for bears.

After a while the mayor came over and said, ‘I’m hungry. Where are my bears?’

Somebody told the mayor that they had disappeared into thin air and the mayor said, ‘That’s impossible,’ and got down and looked under the porch. There were no bears there.

An hour or so passed and everybody gave up looking for the bears, and the sun went down. We sat outside on the front porch where once upon a time, there had been bears.