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James found the Resotron in front of a little yellow house with a gravel driveway at the corner of Kent and Ash late on a Sunday afternoon, just before heading home to tend to the weekend's chores he hadn't yet bothered with - laundry, groceries, and sorting through the week's accumulation of mail. He'd been steered to it by the hand-printed yard sale signs nailed to the telephone poles all along Kent St., the main drag and where he'd been taking a longish walk. Someone had altered the signs with a big thick black marker - everything, free! - presumably sometime after the 8am-12pm timeframe had elapsed, and the salers had shifted gears into the real purpose of any good yard sale: nothing that goes out, can come back in.

The Resotron was in a small picked-over pile of freebies, and James always loved these little piles - partly for the thrill of finding something that appealed and had hidden value - and for free! - and partly for the archaeological curiosity of mining through the tell-tailings of any particular family's or individual's cast-offs. He was disciplined and discerning in what he took home, usually able to content himself with admiring the black pair of never-worn mens figure skates or old John Denver records without actually needing to bring them home.

The Resotron, however, held his attention. It sat on the grass amidst a cheap flaking gold-painted sconce with a shade buckling along the seam, and a small cardboard box of holiday-themed stuffed animals and some rained-on-looking baby board books. It was a smooth dark gray metal, rectangular, and inclined higher at the back end, so that the singular dial on it would be sloped toward the viewer if placed on a table top. It was surprisingly heavy, though only the size of his palm, and he figured it to be from the 1940's or 50's, given the fact that the red dome over the little light above the dial was glass, not plastic, and given the retro look of the font etched into the metal just under the dial.

The etching of the word XRAY under the dial pushed James to err on the side of bringing the Resotron back to his apartment. He was curious, and he liked the juxtaposition of something now as complicated as xray technology distilled onto such a simple but serious-looking device. He carried it the two blocks back to his apartment and put it down on the cluttered and crumby kitchen table, hurrying to answer the phone, which he'd heard ringing from the sidewalk outside.

It was Laurie calling to invite him over for a Sunday afternoon cookout with just her, John and the kids, to take advantage of the particularly warm late September afternoon, more like summer than fall really, and precious to any native New Englander who understood just how long the winter to come would really be. Laurie was James' best friend from college, and though they'd lived at least one time zone apart for the twenty years since then, John's job had brought them to the area four years ago and Laurie and James now saw each other regularly. James had wondered if John would on some level object to Laurie picking back up her friendship with him, but he seemed unbothered by it. He was not a jealous type, and he liked James, and he seemed glad that Laurie had a friend that she seemed to enjoy so much.

James and Laurie had met in a geology class in college. She'd sat next to him in the first lecture, and he'd immediately appreciated the details of her: long twin dark braids, brown eyes so dark you could not distinguish the pupil from the coro

oh my god I am boring myself. This is so not what was in my head. I had something much more immediate in mind and instead its taking ten years to describe the resotron which is not even the point.

Pffffffffffft.