Do you have a minute for a question? It’s a hot day and I’m looking for an interesting idea for a column.

What sort of formal clothing would you recommend for, say, a gentleman approaching an advanced age, seeking work, say, as a butler? And do any of you readers know of anyone who has a really rich great grandmother?

Hold on now, you probably read me and think I’m a little nuts, which I am and always have been, but I really need your advice, and, hopefully, you read me and enjoy my work as a columnist. As you know I’m sadly without She, and I have a lot of spare time.

First, I wouldn’t give up writing this Sunday column, because I have bills to pay, and I have this 45-year-old cockatiel with arthritis.

Some ask why I’m constantly looking for work. Absurd. I love my job, I truly do, and with a column, podcast and film review, it consumes the better moments of my day.

Still, it leaves my evenings too free when the “windmills of my mind” refuse to stop turning.

No, it’s an interesting “hobby” I seek, and doing laundry has grown tiresome.

A butler. Egad! Don’t you get it? A butler. They’re elegant like Sir John Gielgud. I’ve always longed to be elegant. Often I would put a tie and jacket on and ask She if I looked elegant.

She would look up from her book and ask, “Are you OK? Let me feel your forehead.”

But now, as the days of wine and roses are gone and nights are growing longer and darker, I think playing a part-time butler might be fun.

I would have quiet after hours to write after a day of bringing tea to some old rich great-grandma. She would have to be at least 90 so as to make me look much younger. Ego dies faster now.

I know, there probably aren’t a lot of rich, elderly great-grandmas or even drawing rooms here in Central Maine.

These days I watch a lot of 18th century British shows at night, and that’s kind of where I got the idea. But I can’t go to England. I don’t have enough money to get up to Jackman, where you can bet there isn’t a decent drawing room to be found.

I know a few “old” ladies in Central Maine, but they’re my nice friends, they don’t look old, they’re not rich and they certainly don’t have drawing rooms. Nor would they want me hanging around their yards in a tuxedo holding a silver tray full of tea cups. I need a really old lady like Dame Margaret Rutherford from the Agatha Christie “Miss Marple” movies.

I think I would have to put an ad in the Portland Press Herald or spend the autumn prowling the summer porches of Hyannis Port with flowers in hand.

The danger here is, should I find the perfect old lady, she might expire suddenly with tea cup in hand and Amy Calder’s police report would read “THE BUTLER DID IT.”

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.