Eleven in the morning

from Uncle Albert's notebook (cahier)

"How long have we been taking him to Dr. Feight?" I asked Roz, as if we had been taking him - he can drive. "I think I took him first in January '17," Roz said. "Why?"
          I shook my head. I didn't want to say, "Do you think it's done any good?" because I knew we couldn't tell. It wasn't as if we had two identical Teds, one seeing Dr. Feight and the other not. Then, the question could just as well be, "Do you think it's done any harm?"
          But it has been twice a week since then, I think, though I have trouble keeping track. Sometimes twice, sometimes once, sometimes three times maybe. Sometimes not at all because everyone, even psychiatrists, must take a vacation now and again.
          And how do "we" afford it? A combination of Ted's disability and Roz's insurance and Dr. Feight's good graces is what I imagine. I write this tonight because we went again today.
          Eleven in the morning. I read the magazines in French in the waiting room, the ones Dr. Feight subscribes to for me - Paris Match, Charlie Hebdo, L'Express, an ever-changing array. "We" are paying him too well, je crois. Then, we go home to a lunch which Ted fixes, or sometimes we go out. 

Today, we met the mordanted Axel, the model of Norse Lutheran pain and gloom except on Midtsommarnatt, when he runs, or trots, naked through College Heights at the hinge of light and dark. (Part of the ritual: his neighbors draw their curtains five minutes before sunset. Or so I have been told.) He asked Ted how it went. Ted said, "Fine." And that was that or would have been had I not said, "Any letters from dead Moira lately?" But he said, "No." Then, that was that.
          We ate the savory lentil soup, which our waitress, not much bigger than a mouse and dressed in mousy, anti-Christmas colors, brought us in heaping bowls. We drank our oatmeal stouts, Axel and I - Ted drank water. And we spoke of other things - the frigid weather, the last-night's Eagles-Seahawks game, and the septation of the "United" Methodist Church as the pro-gays and the anti-gays fought on a bloody, muddy field for the love of their different gods.                                                                                                                                           12/19/23