What I did today.

 What I did today. 

“What did you do today?” Roz said, coming into the kitchen even before she took her coat off to see what I was doing today about supper.
     “I talked to Nils,” I said.
     “I thought you talked to him yesterday.”
     “I did, but I needed to talk to him again.”
     “Where's Albert?” Roz said. “He’s not in his chair.”
     “I don’t know.”
     “My God, Ted!” Roz said. And I went to look for him while she went to take her coat off.

He wasn’t that far. He was in the bathroom, listening to us wonder where he was. No, he didn’t need any help getting up and back to his chair, please close the door, he said.
     “He’s in the bathroom,” I told Roz when she came back to lift the lid on the borscht I was doing for supper. “We have sour cream?” she half-asked and half-declared. And I nodded.
     “So, you talked to Nils,” she said. “And you were going to tell me why.” Actually, I wasn’t.

 Excursus. Notice she didn’t ask why! She decided I was going to tell her.
     When I was six, or thereabouts I promised myself – if you can promise yourself anything when you are six, and I couldn’t have been any older – I promised that I would never ask anyone why they did something because that was the worst thing adults did, especially Aunt Martha, who we were living with at the time.
     I’d something I shouldn’t have apparently, and she would ask me why – or she would accuse me why – and I couldn’t answer because I didn’t know. And she would look at me and say, “I thought so!” Then, blowing out her breath, “Well, God forgive you,” in a voice carrying some doubt. Which ended the conversation that wasn’t because I hadn’t added a word to it.
     So, Roz doesn’t ask why though she will assume that I will get around to saying why because by now, some years older than six, I should know. And sometimes I do.

¿Ya nos estamos divertiendo?*

 “Because when we talked yesterday, I lied to him,” I said.
     “What?” I think she did start to ask “why,” but she ended up exclaiming, “Whuh-uht!” And then to cover herself she lifted the lid on the borscht again and looked into it as if she could see whether there was, or wasn’t, enough salt in it.
     “I told him you didn’t want to talk to him when you weren’t home to talk at all.”
     “Oh,” she said, reaching for the pepper. “Well, that’s okay. I probably didn’t.”

Sadly, it isn’t hers to say, “Okay.” No one can forgive but the one you have injured and God himself. The priests, for example. They are like the scribes of the pharisees, Aunt Martha once said. The bishops and the cardinals are like the pharisees themselves, and the pope is like either the chief priest or the devil, depending. Anyway none of them can forgive.

10.31.21

_______________
*Philip IV as Zippy the Pinhead, Halloween 1621. 400th anniversary souvenir fan. Graphic by m ball with apologies to Diego Velázquez and Bill Griffith.

Everyone's a critic

continued from here
Another quarter heard from 

or everyone’s a critic

Dear Ted,
     Your friend has the epigram half right, the crushing of a thought, event, or feeling into as few syllables as possible. But He doesn’t get the other half, I don’t think, making the thought, event, or feeling painfully clear (as painful as brain freeze and not unlike it). I write because you asked.
     While I’m at it: What are you doing to poor Nils? Granted, he is something of a blowhard, a Cives Gloriosus, still you don’t mislead people, at least not intentionally! That’s not who you are! Is it? At least in your blog, though you are genuinely confused about nearly everything, you are also thoroughly honest; you do not dissemble, and you are never mean?
     Have I been reading you wrong?
                                                            Yes or no? – Trudy

 I hate it, the telephone. (I hate it, I hate it, I hate it.) I answer it when I feel I have no other choice. But I don’t call anyone.
     Today though, I call Nils.

“Bueno,” he says. He’s learning Spanish. “Eduardo,” he says before I can answer. He can see me – or he can see my name – on his screen.
     “Si! Para continuar in Inglés, oprima el dos,” I say, and I push two, and it boops. “I need to talk to you,” I say, “in Inglés.”
     “Are you going to vote? Did you decide to vote, then?”
     “No,” I say. “Still no.” I wait, but he doesn’t interrupt. It’s gray outside – it’s going to rain – and it’s gray in the kitchen because the sun is behind the clouds on the other side of the house.
     “But I misled you,” I say. Again, I wait. No interruption. The kitchen is the usual mid-morning mess: Roz has piled her breakfast dishes and Uncle Albert’s breakfast dishes in the sink. Mine are still on the table. It’s my job to clean everybody’s up – to scrape them, to rinse them, to put them in the dishwasher. To wash out the sink and to mop down the counters.

     “I told you,” I start. “Wait a minute,” I interrupt myself. “Sorry,” I say. I can hear Uncle Albert stomping around on his three legs upstairs. “Uncle Albert,” I say to Nils. “Maybe I should call you back.” Uncle Albert’s going to call me at any minute to help him down the stairs. That’s what I hear.
     “Okay,” Nils says.

 “Ted!” Uncle Albert calling me. And I go up, and we negotiate the stairs down, and we get him in his chair in front of the television – with his computer on the swivel table on one side of him. And I bring him a cup of Russian tea for the electrical-heating-gadget on the table on the other side. And he has the remotes. And he’s dialed in one of the music channels

and he’s listening to Johnny Griffith and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis, “Tin Tin Deo,” then something by Buddy Rich. And he’s talking to his computer in French, an email to je ne sais pas qui.

I call Nils back. And he answers, “Bueno.”
     And I say, “Yo. Lo siento. I told you Roz didn’t want to talk to you, but in fact Roz wasn’t here.”
     “Oh.” And he waits, and I wait, too. Then: “Why did you do that?”
     I say, “I don’t know. It seemed a good idea at the time.” Maybe he’ll let it drop, I’m thinking, because beyond that I have no explanation. Like Eve in the Garden: being “Queen of the Universe,” wise as The Creator – it seemed a good idea at the time. Maybe he’ll let it drop.
     But he won’t.
     “Okay,” he says, but I can hear that it’s not.

 10.30.21 

Roz declines

  Roz declines the nomination.                                continued from here

“Roz?” Nils says.
     “What?” I answer.
     “I could speak to her, maybe?”
     “I don’t know. Wait.” And “Roz!” I call out before I put the phone down – so Nils can
hear me. Roz is working the yard; she cannot. Then I wonder what I should count up to to have found her and talked to her and come back to the phone And I decide 100, if I can’t slowly. I sit down at the kitchen table. In the middle is the wooden salt and pepper Roz bought on a trip she and her friend Maggie took to Abingdon. (Where they saw a sign!)

 “Nils,” I say into the phone.
     “Yes.”
     “No.”
     “No what?”
     “Roz doesn’t want to talk to you.”
     “Oh.”
     “Yeah.” I try to sound sympathetic. I do sound sympathetic … like sugar and cinnamon. (I’m still sitting at the kitchen table.) Or a ballad sung by what-they-used to call
“a girl singer,” a really good one, like Norah Jones.
      “Did she say …” He doesn’t get to “why”; he interrupts himself: “Never mind.”
     “She said,” I talk over him, I jump in between ne- and -ver. I say, “she’d already voted” over “mind.”

“Okay,” Nils says. “I don’t suppose … Albert?”
     “He’s asleep, I think.”
     “Yeah.” [Pause.] “Okay.” Nils sounds – for once! – as if he doesn’t know what to say next.

 So, it’s been a good conversation.
                                                                  10.27.21 

My friend Dietrich is trying to write epigrams. Again – he tried once before. You can judge his success. Let me know if you think I should discourage his continuing:

Forgivable Sin

She didn’t get the joke,
their hacking laughter.
“the suicide in love with death,
and life thereafter.”

 Supplication

She shudders—she knows,
despite his airs,
how he paws her over
in his prayers.

Homecoming Queen

 Homecoming Queen 

The phone rings. I make the mistake of answering it.
     “Ted!”
     “Yeah,” meaning “yes, it is.”
     “It’s Nils!”
     “Yeah,” meaning “yes i know.”
     “Long time!”
     “Yeah,” meaning “yes, it has been.”

“Listen,” he says: “Are you going to vote?”
     “For what?” I know, but I ask.
     “Governor. All that stuff. But especially governor,” he says, but he is already losing patience with me.
     “Roz is. And Uncle Albert registered back in the summer.
     “But you ... ?”
     “So, I was going to say: ‘I don’t need to.’”
     “You do! It’s going to be tight!”
     “It’s not something ... ,” I start, not knowing how I’m going to finish. But then: “I don’t vote. I’m not competent.”
     “Are you registered?”
     “It’s not going to be tight anyway.” And I pause, “Uh,” as if I’m going on though I’m not.

“Are you ... ?” Nils starts again.
     “Yeah,” meaning “yes i am” “registered.”
     “Then?”
     “When I was competent I did,” I say.

“But who would you vote for?” Nils says.
     “Who’s running?” I know that, too, but I ask.
     “Come on!”
     “I don’t know,” I say as if I didn’t. Then, “There’s the money guy and the money guy, right? – the one that has the money and the one that raises money, right?” I say “right?” again.
     “Okay. So, yeah. Let’s say ‘Yeah.’ Which?”
     “I don’t know. That’s where I’m incompetent. I can’t see the difference.”

“What?” he’s not screaming because he’s stopping himself because I’m not competent – he knows that – and he doesn’t want to rile me. (Not that I get riled; I’m famous for not getting riled.)* “Between Trump and non-Trump you don’t see any difference?”
     “Wait,” I say, but he doesn’t.
     “Or, ‘What has Trump got to do with this?’ – are you saying that?”
     “I wasn’t,” I say, “but go ahead.”
     “Because Trump has to do with everything.”
     “Is he God now?”

I think he is going to say, “There is no God and there is Trump.” Or, he’s going to say, “God is dead; that fucker is still with us.” Or something like one of those. But he doesn’t. He says,
     “No, not exactly. But maybe he is the opposite!”
     “So the money guy is the devil?” I say.

                                                          10.25.21
  ________________
* Until I do, but then I don’t really. I don’t yell or scream or anything like that. I just go into another room. Then from there I go to bed.