Ozymandias II

 Ozymandias II 

Uncle Albert likes Nils.* “He has energy,” Uncle A says, meaning, I think, the kind of energy I lack. “That’s okay,” I think, meaning for Uncle Albert to think that, for he’s right: I do lack energy.

     I like Nils, too. But: “You like everybody,” Roz said not too long ago. It wasn’t a compliment. She doesn’t like Nils. “He’s one of those people,” she said at the time, “like your sister Hannah, who knows what you are thinking better than you know yourself.” “Maybe,” I said. But I could see her point.

     “Or, he knows what you ought to be thinking,” Roz said. “He knows what you would be thinking if you hadn’t unaccountably lost your way.”

     I didn’t want to say, “But I do tend to lose my way”; but I found myself saying it anyway. Roz looked at me askance, or she pretended to look at me askance. “Oh, Ted,” she said. And she stood up and walked out of the room. Into the kitchen. We were talking in the front room, and she got up and went through the dining room and into the kitchen.

     She came back only a few minutes later. She brought me an orange she’d peeled for me. “Here,” she said. Then: “When you lose your way, you . . . .” She stopped. I thought she was going to say something about how it’s her job to find it again - not Nils’s - but she was going to say it jokingly. She didn’t say that though. She just stopped. Then, she said, “Oh, Ted” again, tenderly.

by m ball**

Nils called this afternoon - the Fourth of July.

     “What are you doing?” he asked.

     “I’m watching football,” I said. “Uncle Albert and I are watching Arsenal-Wolves.”

     “Wolves-Arsenal,” Uncle Albert called from the other room.

     “Listen,” Nils said. “What you wrote about monuments. It’s right as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go far enough.”

     “Oh.” And I thought, “Well, it goes as far as I’ve gotten.”

     “You need to say something about how they - the monuments - reflect the culture, the view of history of those that put them up.

     “Narrow,” Nils said. “Very narrow. They’re put up by those that can raise the money to put them up. They don’t consult those that wouldn’t contribute if you paid them - not that they could contribute unless you did.”

     I didn’t say anything.

     “Pay them!” he said.

     “Yes,” I said. I knew what he meant.

     “So they don’t represent a time and a place really but only a very narrow slice of time and place and that narrow slice’s narrow, narrow point of view.”

     “Yes,” I said.

     “You get what I’m saying,” Nils said.

     “Yes,” I said.

     “Good.”

That wasn’t all of it. He went on, something about how “preservationists” loved their grandmothers more than they loved the truth. But he wasn’t trying to excuse them because doesn’t everyone love his grandmother more than the truth? (It was here I lost the thread for a while. Plus, I’d wandered in from the kitchen and was standing in the dining room door and the ball was pinging from Lacazette to Willock to Lacazette and into the net.) Then,

     “Are you there?” he was asking.

     “Yes,” I said. “But I’ve got to go,” I said.

“I could write something for you,” Nils said.

     “Yes,” I said. Then, “Thank you,” I said, “but I’m all right. I’m not, of course, but you knew that.

07.04.20

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 * Axel Sundstrøm’s brother. See here.

** “proposal for a temporary mini-monument, to ‘djt’. Submitted to the Florida Orange Growers, 2018. Spray-painted styrofoam, twill, and gorilla glue on white-washed board.V