I’m not sure I can call this next one a true encounter. It happened about a month after my brother’s birthday. I was riding on the back of my brother’s motorcycle, which is something that scared the ever-loving-life out of me. He drives it like he has a death-wish and even more so when I’m on it. I had my arms wrapped around my brother in a bear hug fashion with my fingers locked together and my right ear planted firmly between his shoulder blades. We live in one of the few states that wearing a helmet is optional. Normally, our parents insist that we wear helmets but on this particular day, my brother had picked me up at the library and didn’t have his spare helmet with him. This was another part of the reason I was hunkered down and tightly cling to my brother. With the wind whipping through my hair and past my ears, it was zapping away all of my body heat.
We had pulled up to a red light and he was revving the engine when a black pickup truck pulled up next to us. At first, I didn’t pay too much attention to the truck until the light turned green and it started to pull slightly ahead of us. I saw that there was a grown woman and a boy of maybe five or six, sitting in the bed of the truck. The woman had very long hair and the wind was whipping it around so much that I couldn’t see her face. The little boy was standing up, leaning partially into the cab of the truck through the small back window. Then I noticed that the boy was not wearing pants. He had on a long sleeved green and blue wide horizontally stripped shirt and what I can only guess might have been yellow plastic pants. I only got a quick glimpse and I suppose that it is entirely possible that the boy was wearing some sort of Speedo, but it wasn’t really swimming season, so I have my doubts about that.