I picked up the phone.

continued from here

 I picked up the phone.                                                 

I picked up the phone.

     “Where are you?” Uncle Albert’s voice said.

     “What do you mean? You’re calling me.”

     “I mean, ‘Why aren’t you out front?’ You’re supposed to be picking me up.”

     “For what?”

     “I’m coming over to watch the match.”

     “Well . . . ,” I said for lack of anything better.

     “Manchester United - Tottenham.”

     “That was Monday.”

     “This is Monday.”

     “Well . . . ,” I said, still searching. “Who won?” I said.

     “It starts in less than an hour.”
     “Well . . . ,” I said.

“Have you lost track of the days again?” Uncle Albert’s voice said.

     “Don’t I have an appointment on Mondays?” I asked.

     “You said it had been postponed.”

     “Until when? What did I say?”

     “Tomorrow.”

     “Tuesday?”

     “Yes.”

     “But today’s Tuesday, I thought you said.”

“Maybe where you are,” his voice said. It had an exasperated edge to it.

     “I think it is. Let me check.”

     I looked at Tural, but he wasn’t there. He must have gone in the back. “Tural,” I called out. “Sorry. What’s today?”

     “Two-eight,” he called back. “Or maybe seven,” he said.

That’s the way it ended with a bang as well as a whimper, because my head was still wrapped in a bandage.

     “I’ll be there as soon as I can,” I told the voice of Uncle Albert. “But I don’t know when that will be.”

08.30.18

last day in Pompeijo

 gore and blood 

This was Friday:
     Waking up from yet another nap. Roz is . . . where? I grope my way out of bed, climb into my shoes, wander out of the door. Groggily I head out to look.

Even the tourist board, if there is one, must admit there is a shit problem dogging the streets and sidewalks of Pompeijo - not because dogs roam free, though a few do, but because no one picks up after his. Where there is shit, people that know me well could well tell you - where there is shit, I will step in it. It’s not that I’m not careful - that’s not the problem at all. I am careful! - as you are, until we forget to be.

     But here was an alarmingly large mass to have missed: squirrish! - the ordure oozing over the sole to take hold of the instep. A misplaced carefulness that ended badly: 
     ➛ even worse than it began when I stopped to take my shoe off and leaving it outside (tongue hanging out, gagging on the stink), to step into what looked like a hardware store - or a blacksmith’s shop, into the peaceful smell of iron and lubricant - trusting to find some sort of scraper,
     ➛ when I stepped wrong foot first, sock-foot over the threshold and onto a nail protruding from the floor, then ratcheting the stung foot under me like an awkward flamingo, losing my balance and sprawling - actually thinking, “into a ragged pool of salmon-colored featherism” 
     ➛ but no, rather - onto the wooden floor in a human heap, only first
     ➛ banging my head on the way down on the spiked knee of a suit of armor standing, battle-axe in hand just inside the door.

     ➛ a crash and another and another, a great racket of collapsing tin. And blood. Mine. 

So, I fainted. But, it was not so much, it seems, the blood, that the white-coated pharmacist from next door couldn’t staunch it and wind it up in a turban of gauze, while his unwillingly generous assistant wrestled the shit off my shoe. 
     The turban was topped, covered, by an enormous fedora borrowed from “the smith.” And I went limping on my way.

     On my way back. To the hotel.

     Why limping, if it was my head that was injured? Because the best assistant of the best pharmacist in the Land of Nodia (Kristovia) can’t . . . . A whiff of shit still clung to the one shoe; it needed to be dragged along the pavement.

Tural offered apologies - I thought on behalf of the city. Apparently, he didn’t have to see my bandaged head to know what had happened - less than two blocks away.

     “A tragedy, sir,” he said. An overstatement, I thought, but I was more than ready to accept regrets on behalf of the dog-owners of the city. But he went on:

     “You have not read [reed], I don’t think. Your SenatorJohnMcCain [one word] die. A brave man but not enough to stand up to war. He never meet one he not want to join in.”

     I nodded.

“I have phone call for you,” Tural went on. “You answer?” putting the instrument on the counter, shining black Bakelite. “If so, just pick up.”

to be continued

08.29.18

There's no place like under your own bed.

 “There’s no place like under your own bed.” 

                  This is what it feels like:

Dr. Freud and me

     Every night I am looking under the bed for red shoes to click their heels together. “There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home. There’s no place like home!”

One of the purposes of travel - it must have purpose; it’s not something we do by accident - one of its purposes is to “broaden horizons,” to help the traveler overcome his clinging to home and to safety and to see the wider world, to see that there is more to wonder at and delight in than to fear. But I’m not seeing that. Not at the moment. 

     The days are not so much to be delighted in as to be gotten to the end of. We make a schedule: less in order to see, to hear, to smell, and to wonder about. More to get through, to make it to the end of, to say we did it. Then, we can go home and rest up, get back into something of a routine, God willing!

Sad, I know. But there are extraverts, and there are introverts. There are the calm and the anxious. And the blind don’t always come to see, whatever the hymn implies.

     There are those that have to commiserate with the servant that hid his talent under the bed.

08.27.18

Our (new) room

 Our (new) room 

We have decided to stay where we are for as long as we are here. (That will be until I wake up, I’m thinking.) “Where we are” meaning at the hotel. The hotelkeeper, Tural, has offered us a weekly rate, considerably less than the daily rate, even less if we only have our sheets and towels changed on Mondays and Thursdays. And he will move another armchair into the room and, if we want, take out the table-and-two-chairs and put in a desk.

     I think we like the table better than a desk though I’ll have to ask Roz. We need another chair, though, or a sofa. And either would be fine. Tural asked, too, if we’d rather have a sofa than a second chair. I told him I’d check to see.

     It’s a big enough room for either the two chairs (with footstools) or a couch and a coffee table in addition to the table-and-chairs and the two narrow beds. We could push the beds together, too, Tural says. “If you wish it.” I tell him I’ll ask Roz. (I think we wouldn’t because it would put the doubled bed out of alignment with the wooden crucifix that hangs over the one and the faded Virgin and Child over the other.)

The table is under the window that looks out onto the street and through which if you stand in just the right place you can see a slice of the harbor. The window is directly opposite the door. The walls are almost the same green that was in your junior-high-school classroom in the sixties. The ceiling from the picture rail up is white. There’s a faded Turkey carpet on the floor.

     Roz says, “Sofa,” which is already on the wall opposite the beds. “Sofa,” she says, “if we can have a lamp at each end.” Tural says we can. So (not very good resolution, does not do credit to my excellent drawing):

 08.22.17

Jesop's farables: the river and the sea

Jesop in rain hat by m ball

 Jesop’s Farables 

“a river and the sea”

A river grew tired of always flowing into the sea. He told her so. She laughed. He vowed then to change his course. But he never managed to keep his vow.

 

  08.20.18  

_______________
An online reproduction of the 1887 edition Jesop's Farables, translated from the Latin and edited by G. F. Murray - and with my brief afterward - is available here!

Another farable: the lamb and the lamb

 Another farable 

 “a lamb, a lamb, and a shepherd”

Two lambs were being led to slaughter. Said one to the other, “Do you know where we are going?”

     “No,” said the other, “but it’s a beautiful day. The sun shines, and the clouds are even whiter and fluffier than we are.”

     “True,” said the first, looking at the man leading them, “but I hear we really need rain.”

     “Yes,” said the second. “We do. We should wish for rain,” he said.

08.15.18

Excursus: another farable

 Excursus: another farable of Jesop* 

Fables are whittled down to a point, e.g. Aesop’s “The Boy That Cried Wolf,” whose point is this : “There is no believing a liar even when he speaks the truth” [George Fyler Towsend’s translation]. Parables

Jesop

are unruly until, uncomfortable with how messy they are becoming, we whittle them down to the point we wish them to make, as Matthew does with “The Parable of the Sower and the Seed,” when he turns it into an allegory. Farables are made of sterner stuff; they cannot be made other than what they are, pointless.

     We know Aesop and esteem him. We know Jesus, and many revere him. Jesop we do not know,** probably with good reason. Why should we pay attention to one that seems to believe life has no point, only a shrug?

“the crow the size of a fox” 

In Tabula Rasa was a crow the size of a fox and a fox the size of a crow. Said one to another, “I am glad I am not you, for then I could not fly.”

  08.14.18 

________________

 * An online reproduction of the 1887 edition Jesop's Farables, translated from the Latin and edited by G. F. Murray - and with my brief afterward - is available here!

 ** though he was bedtime reading for four British poet laureates, Laurence Eusden, Thomas Warton, Henry James Pye, and Alfred Austin.