You don't know me...

I was passing a downtown corner cafe one late afternoon on my way to a supermarket to fetch dinner fixings, I stopped waiting for green light (I was walking), when a familiar voice behind me called my name.  I turned around and there emerging from the cafe was a friend who noticed me passing. "Hey," he said, "I've got a joke for you!". I apologized for not having one to tell him, as I almost always did when we met, even though I did have one, but it was about a marriage, he was unhappily divorced, and I didn't want to upset him.

He proceeded to tell me the joke. A day later,  I don't remember any of it.  He turned to go back inside the cafe, and I called after him, "Wait, I do have one!", and I told him my joke.  He found it funnier than I had when I first heard it a few days earlier.

"Where are you headed?" he asked, and I told him, before we said goodbye.

He knows me for the jokes that I almost always have when we meet, and I know him for vast knowledge of the local lore and personalities, public and private.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L-5LwRinkJ0

Through Stained Glass Darkly

The other day I spotted an Andre Perkins somewhere on Internet and for a brief moment I thought I had found my long lost boyhood friend from the neighbourhood and the first three grades of school.   I realize that Perkins is a fairly common last name, but the French sounding Andre instead of Andrew,  is not quite so popular. In the end, this Andre turned out to be a young man, too young to be my Andre's son, and too old, I decided, to be his grandson.

It occurred to me then that those from our long, long distant past of childhood and early youth, if they are still living, have probably forgotten us, while those from the near past are trying hard to forget us.   Which leaves the acquaintances from the not too distant, or distant but not yet forsaken  past.   I had a proof of this theory last month when my land line telephone rang and the male voice introduced himself as the brother of my old girlfriend Susan.  I didn't know that Susan had a brother, or I did and had forgotten about it; I knew her sister Lisa, whom I had called Mona Lisa, who looked so much like Susan that you could mistake them for twin sisters, and whose beauty was the same subtle kind that eludes most men and all Hollywood agents.

I didn't ask Susan's brother how he had found me because I am not difficult to locate - there is no other person on this continent with my first and last names, though I've been told that I have a twin in Australia or New Zealand (which one of us is the evil twin I couldn't say), and  I'm listed in the telephone directory, if you know which city's directory to look up; I'm also like most people on the Internet, in much more gory detail than I would prefer to be.

After the customary greetings and inconsequential small talk, he asked me if I minded if Susan herself contacted me.  How many years has it been, 25, 27? I asked why she didn't call herself, and he said she thought I'd still be mad at her, not wanting to speak to her ever again.   I didn't ask him the obvious follow-up question if she had asked him to call me or if it was his own  idea after something she said, knowing that it is one of those questions that whatever the answer we'll never believe it's the truth.

He said that Susan was now a widow, her husband died following a fist fight with Chip, a painter, and stained glass artist  (as his name suggests, in one of those unavoidable coincidences),  whom I introduced to Susan back then, and who did some work for her church and also for her husband.   The fight was over Chip's assignment, they were both hot heads, Susan's husband fell, hit his head on a curb, dying a few days later in hospital.   There were no criminal charges, and Chip himself died six months later of a blood disease.

 I told him that I was never mad at her, and that I was mad at my bad luck and rotten fate.  You see, when Susan and I were going together, she was already engaged, to a fellow she knew from childhood and who was at the time studying in England.  It seemed to her like an arranged marriage,  and she had second thoughts about it, which I did nothing to encourage or discourage, and when he returned, she left me, a penniless bum just out of college, and married him, a man on the rise.   I was crushed and I packed my things, got into the car and drove for 24 hours straight, finally stopping at some cheap motel three states away. I haven't been back since.

And so, I told Susan's brother that no, I didn't mind if Susan contacted me and I hung up, immediately realizing that I didn't get his number or Susan's address or number, so if I decided to contact her, I'd be out of luck as I didn't even remember her last name, married or maiden, and Chip who did know them was dead.

A week later a letter arrived from Susan, not an e-mail, an actual physical letter in a cream colored envelope, with a stamp of bluesman Robert Johnson on it,  whom Susan knew I appreciated.  It was handwritten,  and while I admired her beautiful handwriting, so unusual these days (she must have studied calligraphy), I was reminded of  the failure of my own recent letters to advance my case in other, unrelated matters, some of those letters returned unopened,  and all of them computer generated.

Susan provided a few more details of her current situation.  Or recent situation, because the events described by her brother took place several years ago.  She and her husband were already living separately, still married,  about to divorce, kids in college, he was building a mansion for himself and his next wife, and hired Chip to do some stained glass work.   Chip, according to Susan,  never completely forgave her for leaving me, his best friend at the time.  She knew from Chip that I had never returned, and is wondering if I ever (implying now)  thought of returning.

I haven't answered Susan's letter yet.  I haven't decided what to say, haven't decided if I want to see what time has done to Susan't face and body.  Some things have to wait.

Curtains, pal!

We stepped out of a movie theater inside a shopping mall when she suggested that we visit a department store located there.  She needed to buy fabric for new living room curtains.   And so, instead of talking about the movie we just saw like most people do emerging from cinemas, we were about to discuss home furnishings. And to show you how our memories work, I remember much from this long ago episode, but not the name of the film we saw.

We found our way to the section of the department store where long sheets of fabric were hanging from movable overhead rails.  She pushed the rails back and forth trying to decide.  I made one unsolicited suggestion on a light colored fabric, and she immediately shot it down.   She had to have something that went with her antique dark oak furniture.   While there were over two dozen fabric samples available, most were intended for purposes other than window curtains.   I suggested that we move on and come back another day or visit another store,  but she insisted on selecting something there and then.  There was a single chair near the display, probably intended for frustrated husbands and boyfriends, I figured,  and I sat down in it, while she looked through catalogs, carried on a discussion with the saleslady.  She finally decided on some fabric and made arrangements to have it delivered to the shop of her installers near the apartment house where she lived, a young couple I had met briefly, who I thought didn't inspire much confidence.  But it was all her business.

After several delays,  missed appointments, the installer couple replaced her light colored living room curtains which to my taste were adequate,  with the new set,  dark brown, matching the color of her two antique furniture pieces, new curtains that, in her own words, brought "doom and gloom" to her living room which didn't get much direct sunlight in the first place facing as it were West where another apartment block was rising a hundred yards away.  She was unhappy with the installers, unhappy with the effect of the curtains on her living space.   Apparently, she wasn't happy with me either, because shortly thereafter she broke up the relationship.  "It's curtains, pal!" I told myself, like I imagined Jack Nicholson would say, not altogether brokenhearted, for reasons other than living room curtains.

I told my friend Frank about what happened; I called him "my attorney",  but he was more of a psychologist and mind reader.   "Women test men all the time," he said, "even, as apparently in this case, deciding ex post facto that some event had been a test.  She didn't need your advice at the time of selection, but afterwards she blamed you for letting her choose the nightmare she ended up choosing."

My lesson from the affair? Avoid cinemas attached to shopping malls!

Only Life's Illusions

By strange coincidence two hours after posting early afternoon today (read it first!)  I stumbled upon  this passage in the novel I am currently reading:

The living also believe that what has never happened can still happen, they  believe in the most dramatic and most unlikely reversals of fortune, the sort of thing that happens in history and in stories, they believe that a traitor or beggar or murderer can become a king and the head of the emperor fall beneath the blade, that a great beauty can love a monster, or that the man who killed her beloved and brought about her ruin can succeed in seducing her, they believe that lost battles can be won, that the dead never leave but watch over us or appear to us as ghosts who can influence events,  that the youngest of three sisters could one day be the eldest: perhaps for example. 

Javier Marias -- "Tomorrow In The Battle Think On Me", pg 150.

I suppose it's a good time to hear the Joe Diffie song  Ships That Don't Come In. (Written by Dave Gibson.)

One Mulligan

I lost a friend today.  He packed up his things, sublet the apartment, got in the car and drove away.   Not far from here, but far enough so we won't be seeing each other much. "Will e-mail," were his last words when we said Goodbye, as if that didn't go without saying nowadays.   Heck, we e-mailed each other when he was here, and I regularly exchange e-mails with people on three continents.

Let's roll the film back a month.  "She called me, wants to get back together," he told me as we were sipping our usual cappuccinos in a  downtown cafe.  "After two years?" I said. "A year and nine months," he replied, and I thought that like some people he counted the number of weeks or even hours since the event. Still, a few months ago, it must have been in July, he told me he had finally gotten over her, and now this.

"And what did you say?" I asked.

"I told her I'd think about it.  Has anything like it ever happened to you, a girlfriend coming back?"

"Once when I was nineteen," I said.

"And since then, didn't you always think or hope that it would, could, should happen again?"

"Yes, and it never did.  Fate gives us just one mulligan per lifetime."

Then, he decided.  He didn't ask my advice and I didn't offer unsolicited words of wisdom. What was I to say?  Let him enjoy his mulligan while it lasts.

One Word, One Thing

 

I watched an interview with a woman writer (no, not Alice Munro), who said that  that the ideas for  her novels start with a single word.  That's how she started writing her previous book, from a word that she made up, a neologism, and while she was writing it, a couple of words jumped out at her, she jotted them down, thus getting a start on her next novel.

Then, there was a photographer, who said in a recent interview that he photographs just one thing at a time.  That's all I caught from a page of a newspaper or magazine, promising  myself to come back to it, and as happens so often, lost the source and the memory of where I had seen it.

I on the other hand photograph three things at a time, believing that a photograph must contain three elements of interest, such as the photograph I snapped yesterday afternoon at a street fair.  It's not very good, but it should illustrate the point.

All this leads me via some twisted path to the short piece below which had its source in a single sentence I overheard somewhere in passing, just it and nothing else.

*  *  *

"I don't spend time considering hypothetical situations!", I said, trying best to hide annoyance.  It's not going to happen, so why waste your brain bandwidth.  That river has long ago flowed to the sea. And I'm not standing on the bridge no more.  What if, what if, what if!   We'll deal with it when it comes about. Except that it won't.  But if it did, I think that I would say, no, thank you. Damn, it turns out I'm considering a hypothetical situation anyway.  "Let's go for ice cream at the new Italian place around the corner," I said getting up.

Without a Word

"I spoke three words all day yesterday,"  said my friend  Walker, "Beer and thank you."

"You're a regular chatterbox," I said, sipping my pint of IPA. "On Sunday I spoke to no one, not even the cat, and on Monday, I spoke one word to anyone, and it was 'No!'"

"Well, who did you treat to such a rude refusal?" asked Walker.

"A young woman," I replied pausing for a couple of seconds to wait for his reaction.  "I was picking up a prescription that my doctor sent down to the pharmacy in the morning, after a blood test revealed I needed a stronger dose, 10% stronger, to make me 10% crazier, I suppose, and isn't it wonderful how such  transactions can be completed without a visit to doctor's office, without a word spoken, electronically, and as she was handing me the medication, along with the required sheets of paper describing its effects, after-effects and side effects, the sheets that no one ever reads, the pharmacist asked 'Would you like additional information ?"