Later the same day . . .

 Later the same day . . .  

Uncle Albert said, “That John has had a lot more followers than Jesus.” **

     “Yes,” I said. “Yes.”

01.31.17

Incipiat - rated [R]

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 Incipiat – rated [R]  

“It’s John of Patmos,” Uncle Albert was crowing. He had in front of him on the kitchen table a book of Aubrey Beardsley drawings; he was looking at the “Lacedemonian Ambassadors,” pointing to the most angry of the three: “The answer to the trivia question," he said: ‘Who had the most massive hard-on in Scripture?’” He looked up at me, leaning over his shoulder, pot in hand. I had been standing at the counter pouring my first cup of coffee.* I shook my head. “John of Patmos! longing, yearning; gloriously, furiously, joyously erect for the destruction of the world.”

Patmos John priapically pacing.

I went back to pouring my coffee; I put in a slice of bread for toast. “Imagine the little man pacing his cell, stalking his enemies – never mind what Jesus said: ‘Love them’ – stalking, growling in his throat, imagining grabbing them by the neck, screaming at them that they shall die horrible, painful deaths, drowning in a lake of reasty fire – slow . . . painful. No, not so easy: not painful, excruciating; not slow, eternal.

      “Let the inquisition begin!” Uncle Albert thundered, raising his arm above his head, barely missing hitting me in the face, his index finger pointing at the sky - through the kitchen ceiling and the floor above and the bathroom above the floor and the bathroom ceiling, the attic beams, the attic air, the slate roof – at the sky!

The toast popped up. I put it on a plate, buttered and jammed it. I sat down with the plate and my coffee.

    Uncle Albert remained dramatically in position, pointing. I nodded. “Let the inquisition begin,” I said.

01.31.17

_______________

* As the reader knows, I am allowed two a day, one at breakfast and one at two in the afternoon.

Dog day's night

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 Dog day’s night 

I am sleeping in the front bedroom, because I don’t sleep – I only wander in and out of dreams wandering in and out of me. Apparently, I talk more at night than during the day now. Roz sleeps in our bedroom, so she can sleep; and Uncle Albert sleeps in the guest room.

This morning the dog came into my room. For some minutes he sat sentry at the front window, squinting through the slats of the shutters. Apparently satisfied, he left, and I could hear him rolling around on the rug in Roz’s room, snorting.

     The next I heard, Roz was taking his leash off the hall tree at the bottom of the stairs. She told him to sit. I heard her fastening the leash; I heard him shake himself; I heard them leave.

     I heard them come back. They came up the stairs. He came back into my room. She stood at the door. “I’m going now,” she said.

The dreams are not frightening, but utterly confusing. I am constantly trying to find my way – to the airport, to the train station, to a meeting, a party. I know where I am and I know the way, but every time I set out the landmarks begin changing. When I stop, I know where I am and I know the way. When I set out again, I am lost. I stop: “This way, then. Clearly.” I see it. I set out. But when I look up: the drug store should be on the other side of the street. I stop, close my eyes, take a breath, and turn around. I set out again.

01.30.17

Saturday in a parka with Al

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 Saturday in a parka with Al 

“It’s amazing – and don’t tell me what the thermostat says – it’s amazing how much colder it’s become as the globe has warmed,” Uncle Albert, wrapped in my anorak, said this morning at breakfast.  “I know what I know and damn-all to anyone that doesn’t know the same thing,” he added.

     He also said:

Uncle Anorak

     “I don’t think I’ve ever met a righteous person that wasn’t also self-righteous. Then, I’ve never met anyone that isn’t self-righteous to some degree. Cynics are cynical about everyone but themselves.”

     “Humility is no match for ego. Even if I look a hundred years old and smell of rotting flesh, if my mind is beginning to fail and I know it, that I recognize my failings, when others clearly don’t recognize theirs, becomes a source of pride.”

     “So, the church tells us that Jesus was human as well as divine – ‘the Gospels tell me so.’ How is it then, according to them, whenever he ‘went aside’ it was to pray, never to pee?”

Roz didn’t have to go to work today, so we ate late but well: eggs and toast and bacon, orange juice and coffee. “You’re on your own for the rest of the day,” she said, as we got up from the table.

     I washed and Uncle Albert, still seated, dried. Then I put everything away.

Later, Arsenal beat Southampton 5-0 (pronounced “nill”). Later still, Roz went out with her friend Jackie, and Uncle Albert and I took naps.

01.28.17

Parabolic curve ball

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 Parabolic curve ball 

“The Good Samaritan” by Paula Modersohn-Becker
oil, tempera on canvas. 37 x 31.3 cm. 1907

Apropos of nothing – his usual modus operandi – Uncle Albert says, “I’ve been thinking about ‘The Parable of the Good Samaritan,’ which should be rather ‘The Parable of the Priest and the Levite,’ because the story is really about them, their envy.”

     We are sitting across the kitchen table from one another. Once again I’ve fallen asleep right after lunch as soon as I lay down on the couch to read; but I’ve awakened in time for my second cup of coffee. I am allowed two cups of coffee a day, one at breakfast and one at two o’clock in the afternoon. I’m drinking my second cup; Uncle Albert is drinking tea. I look up from my cup at him and back down into it.

     “Look,” he says, “at the way it ends. ‘Go and do likewise,’ Jesus says, meaning like the Samaritan.”

     He pauses. I look up again, nod.

     “So the priest and the Levite, if they’re listening, they’re thinking, ‘Yeah, we’d have done that, we could as well have, but . . . .’”

      “But they didn’t know?”

      “More that they had other things to do. But now they’re thinking all of a sudden, desperately, how they could have done both. That’s the essence of envy; we want both what we have and what the other guy has, too; and we want the credit that our good intentions (now we know them) deserve. The priest and the Levite want to hold onto their important duties in the temple, and their clean hands and pure hearts, and they want to be thought of as good as well. They want to be both pure and good.

     “Ideally, they would have already made a contribution to the Jerusalem-Jericho Road Travelers Aid Society – this is the way they’re thinking; they would have made a substantial donation; they would have been invited to sit on the board; they see themselves at a banquet honoring them for their service. In their acceptance speech, they are saying, ‘This organization with your gifts and [pause] mine [pause] was able to reimburse Samaritan, regrettably not able to be with us today, reimburse him for his time as well as his costs in the ugly but happily resolved Unfortunate Traveler case. (We regret he could not be with us today either.)’

     “The regrets are, of course,empty, pro forma, as no one regrets not having to share the stage.”

The coffee helps a little: my body feels a little more alive; my mind works a little more quickly; my spirit almost moves.

“Pure and good,” Uncle Albert is saying. “Have your cake and eat it, too.

01.24.17

Down there on a(n extended) visit

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 Down there on a(n extended) visit

“Uncle Albert has come to visit.” (January 8th) He’s still here. (January 23)

It’s fine. I don’t always enjoy visiting him, because he’s often a selfish host. But he’s an unselfish guest. Plus, he’s here, as I understand it, for my sake – as he put it, “to keep an eye on me” while Roz is at work . . . and I am not.

     I thought – we all thought, I think – that I would go back to work on Friday; then, Uncle Albert could go home. But I am on a leave of absence until April 3rd. In the meantime, I am supposed to be resting – that’s what I understand; I am supposed to be resting my body, my mind, and my spirit.

Well, “Fuck that!” I want to say; or, I would say if I used that kind of language. (“Fornifreculate that!” Uncle Albert might put it.)

     My body is resting – the medicine makes it slug-like: I get out of bed slower; I take a longer shower; it takes me longer to shave, to shit, to get dressed, to get down to and to eat breakfast. I’ve done three things, and the morning is over. It takes longer to fix lunch. I read at the third-grade level, sounding out the sentences word by word.

Uncle Albert looks on. He sits in the chair he’s appropriated, reading, dozing, reading, craning his neck looking for me, dozing. Occasionally, he checks the news on CNN. He shakes his head, mutters under his breath, writes something in his notebook. I’ll ask what he’s writing. Usually he says, “Nothing that pertains to you.” But sometimes he’ll read it: “‘Let me honest with you’ often indicates that artifice will follow.”

     “What’s that mean?” I ask.

     “It’s too cryptic, isn’t it?” he says. “It means that often when someone says that - ‘I need to be honest with you’ – he is about to give a speech he has rehearsed carefully.

     “How would you put it?” he asks.

     I shrug my shoulders, I don’t know. My mind is slug-like as well. My spirit is the inert stone the body-slug and the mind-slug are inching across.

01.23.17

The inner room, part 2

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 The inner room, part 2  

I came a little early. I’m always worried about being late. Dr. Feight came to fetch me from his waiting room.

     And we went into the other room with the chair and the desk and the couch and the walls of books. And he said again this time, after he’d sat in the chair and I’d sat on the couch, “Tell me what’s going on.” And I said again that I wasn’t sure, but I wasn’t going back to work tomorrow. I had planned to since he’d said I could, but.

     He asked but what? why? had I heard something from work?

     “Yes,” I said. I had been granted a three-month leave of absence, beginning January 1, when my accumulated sick leave (excluding holidays) expired, which meant I wouldn’t go back until April – the third since the first was a Saturday and the second was my birthday. Something like that: it wasn’t entirely clear, except that I would go back on April 3rd.

     “Is that okay with you?” he asked.

     “I hadn’t thought about that,” I said.

Nobody said anything for a minute or two. Then I said: “I stayed up last night and finished the Tanizaki book, the one Uncle Albert bought in Seeville – we talked about it last time. Do you remember how it ends?”

     “Remind me,” he said.

     “It doesn’t,” I said. “The characters are still drifting, and now they’re not sure what they’re drifting toward, maybe not what they thought.”

     “Are they happy about that?”

     “You said they seemed to think that destiny might as well be kind as unkind.”

     He nodded.

     “It seems at the end as if that’s true and the reverse is true as well.”

     He nodded.

     “Destiny might as well be kind as unkind. Also, it might as well be unkind as kind.”

     He nodded.

He kept nodding, and I kept talking, except I wasn’t really talking but blathering: That’s when you put on words like layers and layers of clothing; but if you were to take off the layers, peel them away, you’d find not a naked body but air.

     Then we made another appointment for Monday – I am going to see him Mondays and Thursdays for a while. Then I came home.

Last night Uncle Albert and I went to a service of prayer for the nation, led by a rabbi, an imam, a black Baptist preacher, and the rector of the church where we’d heard Clara Bow preach. Roz went with us.

     Afterward, we all went for pizza. Roz had a glass of wine and Uncle Albert half a pint of stout; I had a Pepsi, because I can’t drink with the medicine I’m taking.

01.20.17

Three from Uncle Albert

Lee and Uncle Albert at the General's
190th birthday, Berlin, 1997.

 Three from Uncle Albert  

[in his cups on the occasion of Robert E. Lee’s 210th birthday]*

Our assumption that the future will be unkind unless (dammit!) we do something about it, only irritates it, makes the future want to strike back at us.

We may name the days of the week what we want, but naming them is no guarantee they will come in the order we assign. This week, for example, Echtmittwoch preceded Dienstag.

Narcissism the philosophical system begins with the proposition, «Ich bin, ergo du bist nichts.»

_______________

* The brackets indicate a stage direction.

01.19.17

The inner room

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 The inner room 

This is still about Tuesday.

     Dr. Feight and I went into the other room in which there was a chair and a desk and a couch and books. “So,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

     I said I wasn’t sure.

He motioned toward the couch and leaned toward the chair.

     Books, lots of them. I walked along the shelves - a half dozen or so by Tanizaki. I pulled Some Prefer Nettles from its place between Naomi and The Makioka Sisters.  “My uncle is reading this one,” I held it up.

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked.

     I said I didn’t think so. Did he remember what the book was about?

     He said he did, about people that knew where they wanted to go but didn’t want to go there. “They hope,” he said, “that if they drift long enough the current will carry them where they want to end up. There is no reason, they seem to think, that destiny shouldn’t be kind, cooperative.”

     “Is there?”

     “What?”

     “Any reason that destiny shouldn’t be kind . . . instead of unkind?”

“Would you like to sit down?” he asked again, moving closer to the chair. “You can bring the book with you, if you like.”

     “No,” I said and put the book back on the shelf, then came and sat on the couch.

     “You may lie down, if you prefer,” he said.

     I shook my head, thinking, “Maybe next time.” But I didn’t say it: “Maybe next time.”

He asked me again what was going on, and I told him about the last several weeks right up to the time we left the house to come to see him.* He made notes on a clipboard.

     He said, “Okay.” He made one more note. “What’s next?” he said.

     “I can go back to work?”

     “I think so. Why don’t you plan to start Friday?”

     I said, “Okay.”

     “We can meet again Thursday,” he said.

Then he asked Roz to come in. He told her he thought I could start work on Friday, and he and I would meet again Thursday.

     She said, “Okay. Good.”

______________

 * You can read about them, beginning with the post for 12/15/16, “Mad House.”
 

01.18.17

Dr. Feight

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 Dr. Feight  

I am looking at the calendar over the phone in the kitchen. Today is Tuesday, January 17th. Yesterday, then, was almost certainly Monday the 16th, the day before Sunday the 15th, and so forth. Tomorrow, pace David Hume, will be Wednesday, January 18th.

On Sunday, Uncle Albert and I went to church. Roz went to coffee with her friend Charlie. In the afternoon, the four of us, Roz, Charlie, Uncle Albert, and I went to Seeville to take back a coat Charlie had bought for her husband Ray and to buy shoes for me. We returned the coat, and Uncle Albert bought a book, something about Nettles by Junichiro Tanizaki; but I couldn’t find shoes that I wanted. We ate a very late lunch or very early supper at a deli. Then we came home.

     Uncle Albert wasn’t feeling well, he said, so he “retired” to his room.

When I checked on him on my way to bed, because Roz said, “Don’t you think you should check on Albert?” – meaning, “At least knock on Albert’s door and see if he’s still alive” – he was sitting at the desk, writing in his notebook. He had the book by Tanizaki open beside the notebook.

     “What are you writing?” I said, then quickly: “Are you all right?”

     “I’m fine,” he said. “I’m trying to write a sentence, but I can’t get it short enough . . . ” He hesitated. “Sharp enough.”

     “Can I see?” I asked.

     “Yes, come in.”

Here is what he had written:

We can fall out of life without dying. Instead, we become abstemious: we stop drinking and smoking and even thinking about women. We begin collecting antique tea sets. We wrap the past in cotton gauze and the present in the past.

“I like it,” I said. “I don’t think it’s too long.”

     “Maybe not,” he said.

     I said, “Are you feeling better?”

     He said, “Some. I’d feel even better if I thought I could get this right.”

    “Well,” I said, “good night.”

     Good night,” he said.

Down the stairs

That was Sunday, and yesterday was Monday, which was a holiday, Martin Luther King Day, so I didn’t go to work; but Roz did, because someone had to be in her office, and it was her turn. Besides she was going to take off part of Tuesday – today – to take me to the doctor.

     So, today we went to the doctor.

His name is Feight. He went to Johns Hopkins, then did a psychiatric residency at the University – that’s what I gathered from his diplomas; I gathered also that he was at least ten years older than I am, which made me wonder. I will be sixty this spring if I live that long.

Dr. Feight’s office is in his house. There’s a separate entrance down some stairs to the basement. You come into a little hallway, and there are two doors, one straight ahead and one to the left marked “Waiting Room.” In the waiting room are two chairs and a couch and a table with magazines: The New York Review of Books and Scientific American and Poetry and Dissent. We had hardly sat down when he opened the door and stepped in, a small, round man in suit and tie, a spray of white hair. Nothing quite fit. The suit-coat was too small, and the trousers too long; the white hair seemed to hover a few centimeters above his head.

     He and I went into the other room in which there was a chair and a desk and a couch and books. “So,” he said. “Tell me what’s going on.”

     I said I wasn’t sure.

to be continued

01.17.17

Prayer

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 Prayer 

We went to church again this morning, Uncle Albert and I. The sermon was from the passage where Andrew and another disciple of John the Baptist ask Jesus where he is staying and he says, “Come and see.” They do come, so I suppose they see. But we do not. It is an irritating aspect of the gospels that they contain no descriptions of people or places. So, we don’t know if Jesus has a room in someone’s house or he has his own house all to himself. Or he might live with his mother, or in a yurt.

On the way home, Uncle Albert said apropos of nothing that had gone before: “No one that doesn’t pray has any real depth.”

     I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. Several minutes later as we were climbing the steps to the front door, he said, “None at all - depth- but he can fool anyone else that doesn’t pray.” Then, he stopped, so I stopped, too, as I was holding his elbow. “No!” he said. “Not anyone else. He can fool anyone that doesn’t pray, including himself.”

There was a note on the door: Her friend Charlie had picked Roz up, and they had gone out for coffee.

     “I used to pray,” I told Uncle Albert as I took down the note, “but I don’t anymore.”

     “Maybe you will again,” he said.

     I said, “Maybe.”

01.15.17

Saturday evening post

 Saturday evening post  

Roz had to work again this morning. She had to work last Saturday morning, because she had taken off Friday afternoon to pick me up and bring me home. She had to work this Saturday morning, because someone was coming in from out of town for something and she had to meet him.

     She told me last night what for, but I’ve forgotten. I remember though that I asked her when I was going back to work – would it be Monday? “No,” she said, “Monday is a holiday.” “Oh,” I said. “Tuesday then?” But no, Tuesday I have another doctor’s appointment. “Then,” she said, “we’ll know more.”

     “Are you going with me this time, then?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, she was. I thought: That’s like Bill Murray said in Caddy Shack about being blessed after he caddied for him with perfect karma by the Dalai Lama. “So, I’ve got that,” he said. “I’ve got that”: Roz will be going with me on Tuesday.

The Premier League is back in action after a week off, so Uncle Albert and I watched Arsenal beat Swansea City this morning. It wasn’t close, but that wasn’t because Arsenal played all that well.

     After the game, Uncle Albert read. He’s reading Cousin Pons by Balzac. I watched and listened to him turn the pages.

After lunch and after my nap, Roz and I went for a walk. I asked her about the guy that had come in from out of town. I apologized for forgetting why she had to meet him. “That’s okay,” she said. “I’m not sure I told you.”

Pero suenan, suenan los timbales.

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We had pork roast for dinner with mango chutney – and mashed potatoes and a salad. Roz had a glass of wine, and Uncle Albert did, too; but I drank water. I’m not drinking wine these days because of some medicine I am taking. After dinner, we did the dishes as merrily as we did before. I washed, and Uncle Albert dried, and Roz put them away.

     Now we’re listening to music from the TV again. We’re listening to Jazz. It’s Tito Puente, “Ran kan kan”: Ran kan kan kan kan. Pero suenan, suenan los timbales.

01.14.17

Friday the 13th

 Friday the 13th 

Today is Friday, the 13th. Tomorrow is Saturday, then Sunday, then Monday is a holiday, but I don’t remember for what.

When I came down to breakfast, Uncle Albert said, “Friday the 13th, she come on a Friday this month.” He was referring to a running gag from the old comic strip Pogo. I said, “Yes, she do.” And I sat down.

     Uncle Albert got up to pour my coffee. I usually do that – first thing. But I was a little shaky, so I sat down. He looked at me and he could see I was shaking and got up to pour the coffee so I wouldn’t spill it. He put the cream in and the sugar and stirred. He put the coffee on the table in front of me. He asked me if I wanted a slice of toast, he didn’t mind making it.

     “I don’t think so,” I said.

We sat at the table for I don’t know how long. The kitchen clock was behind me, and I didn’t want to turn around – I felt too stiff. I need clocks to keep track of time these days, it seems.

Uncle Albert with cat eyes and reading glasses

     Uncle Albert kept reading the paper. And I drank my coffee until the cup was empty. The last few swallows were barely warm.

“What do you want to do today?” I asked, when the cup was empty. He put the paper down and his reading glasses on it. Uncle Albert has this cat-like vision: 96 years old and he doesn’t need glasses except to read.

     He said, “I don’t know. What do you feel like doing?”

     I said that I didn’t know that I felt like doing anything, but shouldn’t we do something?

     “Not necessarily,” he said.

01.13.17

To listen to this week's posts, click here.

M. D.

 M.D. 

I had a doctor’s appointment this morning. I had forgotten it, but Roz reminded me last night. She said, “I know you won’t get up before I do, but if you do, don’t eat or drink anything: you have a doctor’s appointment.

     “And if you get up after I’m gone, don’t eat or drink anything: doctor’s appointment.”

I said, “Okay.” Then, “Are you going with me?” She said, “No,” it wasn’t that kind of appointment, they were just going to look in my ears and listen to my chest and take some blood.

     Then she said, “But Albert can go with you if you like.” I said, “Okay.”

So, he did. He was glad to get out of the house, he said. And he was excited about meeting my doctor because they could speak French together.

     I thought: Even if he comes, is he going to meet Rikka? (That’s her name.) And how does he know she speaks French? (She does, because she comes from The Republic of the Congo, and she studied in Lyon.) But I said, “Okay.”

So, he came. And he came back with me. I had to ask, “Can my uncle come back with me?” – and they said, “Yes, if it’s okay with you.” He held my jacket when the nurse weighed me, and he watched her take my temperature and oxygen level and blood pressure. (They were all good.) Then she left.

     And very soon Rikka knocked, as she always does. And I introduced Uncle Albert, and he said “Bonjour,” and they started prattling away about the weather and Lyon and Trump and Marine Le Pen and shaking their heads at each other.

Rikka told me to go have my blood drawn, so I did. You go across the hall.

     While that was happening, she came in. And when Denise, who was pulling the blood out of me, was finished, and she left the room, Rikka put her hand on my arm and asked me how I was doing.

     I said I didn’t know, and I felt like crying, but I didn’t. Then, “Okay, I guess. Ça va.”

Uncle Albert and I stopped on the way home at Corner Coffee for a cuppa and a donut.

     Not long after we got home, Roz called. She asked me, “How did the doctor go?” I said that “It went fine.

     “Ça va.”

01.12.17

A reading from the Gospel according to Francois

 A reading from the Gospel according to François  

Sherwood Forest

Uncle Albert has been here since Friday. That was the day I came home. Friday. Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and now Wednesday.

     He is up early every morning, dressed and sitting at the kitchen table when I come down. At least, he is up earlier than I am. I am not up early at all. I go to bed early, but I get up late.

     He is up, dressed, sitting at the kitchen table, reading the newspaper. This morning I asked him if there was anything interesting in it. He shook his head. “It’s the same old sadness,” he said. “The world has forgotten how to be merry.”

     We drink coffee and eat toast and jam for breakfast.

I have another cup of coffee after my nap. We sit at the kitchen table again, and Uncle Albert reads to me several of La Rochefoucauld’s sentences. He reads the French, then he translates.

La plupart des amis dégôutent de l’amitié, et la plupart des dévots dégôutent de la dévotion. I’m going to turn this around, he says: Just as most pious people make us lose our taste for piety, most of our friends will make us lose our taste for friendship.

Dans la vieillesse de l’amour comme dans celle de l’âge, on vit encore pour les maux, mais on ne vit plus pour les plaisirs. In the last stages of love as in the last stages of life, it is no longer the pleasures we live for but the pains.

Rien n’empêche tant d’être naturel, que l’envie de la paraître. Nothing prevents our being natural so much as the desire to appear natural.

La plus véritable marque d’être né avec de grandes qualités, c’est d’être né sans envie. The surest sign of having been born great is having been born without envy.

After our coffee and La Rochefoucauld, we go into the living room, and we listen to music. There are music channels on the television. We listen to Latin, and we listen to Big Band.

     Before too long, Roz will come home and ask us what’s for dinner, then she will laugh. We all go into the kitchen, and Uncle Albert and I do what she tells us. I think they are merry, and I try to join in.

     Last night we had eggs and toast and bacon and fruit cocktail. And then we merrily washed the dishes, and merrily we dried them; then we put them away.

01.11.17

If it's Tuesday, it must be Tuesday.

 If it’s Tuesday, it must be Tuesday. 

Uncle Albert has come to visit. He was here on Friday, when I came home. Roz brought me. We stopped for dinner on the way, a place we used to like. I had a fried-green tomato, bacon, and lettuce sandwich, except the lettuce was kale, I think, and it was cooked (like the bacon and the tomato). Roz had something else.

     Then we came home, and Uncle Albert was here. And he was here the next day and the next, when we watched association football and went to church; and yesterday, too, he was here.

And today. He is here to “keep an eye on me.” That’s what he said last night, when I asked him how long he was going to stay. Keep an eye on me while Roz is at work I think he means.

Roz had already gone to work, and he was sitting at the kitchen table, when I came down. He looked uncomfortable. He’s 96 years old, after all, and he is very thin – he sits on his bones.

     I poured a cup of coffee. I said, “You look uncomfortable.” He said, “I’m uncomfortable even when I’m asleep.”

     “Oh,” I said.

The coaches won.

He said, “We didn’t watch the game last night.” I said, “What game?” He said, “The American football game.”

     “Who was playing?” I said. I thought, “I’ve lost track.” I thought, “I don’t even know what game he’s talking about.”

     He said, “Alabama and Clemson.”  “Oh,” I said, trying to put into my voice that I understood what that meant. “Who won?” I asked.

     “Oh,” he said. “The coaches won. And the advertisers.”

I looked at the clock. It wasn’t 9:00 yet. I take a nap after lunch. Then, I can have another cup of coffee.

    

01.10.17