“Why would anyone do that?” Piglet asked.
The man at the other end of the table was reading aloud in a soft girlish voice. He wore an old army jacket and a watch cap, and his gray beard was stained with nicotine. His lips shushed the sibilant letters as he read.
“'Oh bother,' said Pooh.”
The sweet little voice was barely audible over the hum of the library's fluorescent lights and whoosh of the air blowing through heating vents.
A pink-skinned Goth guy in a long black jacket and his female counterpart – a chubby, pale teen in a short skirt and torn black stockings – shared our table. He tapped furiously on a laptop festooned with World of Warcraft stickers while she inked sketches of battling dragons and warrior princesses in an artist's notebook.
A few serious students nosed through the shelves of reference books nearby, but on this bitterly cold day, most of the library's clients were homeless people in need of a refuge. The ones that couldn't read went through the motions anyway to avoid being hassled: leaning over a book, turning pages, staring at pictures surrounded by incomprehensible symbols.
The man with the little girl's voice studied the children's book in front of him patiently, mouthing each word. When he'd deciphered a full sentence, he took a shallow breath and spoke it in the girlish voice.
“That's what Tiggers like best of all!”
He caught me looking and smiled, his eyes sparkling.
“I have a granddaughter,” he said. “I'm practicing so I can read her a story.”
“She's a lucky girl,” I said.
He smiled at me for a second or two more, then turned his concentration back to his book. He was quiet for a long time.
When I looked back at him, he was looking at me, still smiling, but a tear crept down his cheek.
“When my daughter was a little girl, I couldn't read, so I pretended – I'd make up stories from the pictures in her story books.”
He brushed his fingers through his beard. “But I lost my job and I got to be a drunk and I guess my stories weren't very good anymore so she and her mother run off.”
He looked down for a moment and composed himself. “A while later I found out my little girl had a baby. I looked and I looked and I finally got to talk to her on the phone. She was still living out here somewhere and she said she'd let me come read a story to my granddaughter if I stopped being a drunk.”
“And you went out and learned how to read?” I said.
“Yeah and, I swear to God, I didn't drink nothing stronger than water for a whole year. But the hell of it is, I could never find her again. Nobody'll tell me where she is.”
There were tears in his eyes, but he chuckled and smiled his toothless smile. “So, I guess the joke's on me then isn't it? Hell, she's probably too old for bedtime stories by now anyway. But if I find her, I want her to know that I wanted to . . . ”
He looked back down at the book and faded back into his own world.
“Oh bother!” said the little girl's voice.
Saturday, January 12, 2013
Sunday, January 6, 2013
Please Don't Tell me It's Your Plumbing
Just as sure as Lucy is going to jerk the football away just before Charlie Brown can kick it, I knew Lena would stand me up.
She doesn't always stand me up; but I know, sooner or later, I'll be sitting somewhere waiting for her, and when I text or call to find out where she is I'll hear, “Thank God you called, I got a new phone and none of the numbers transferred.”
“So let me guess, you're having an emergency kidney transplant,” I say. My second guess would be a plumbing problem, the same sort of thing people do when they call in sick and claim they have diarrhea because they don't want to expend the energy required to fake a tubercular cough.
“My toilet just absolutely exploded an hour ago,” Lena said. “I've got to wait for the plumber.”
What are the odds? Honestly, before she told me, I'd have bet even money and thrown in a plunger.
“Is it okay if I call you back in a while?” she asks.
I'm sitting in a brew pub in Northwest Portland surrounded by people whose friends did show up. Most of them are laughing. Some are making thigh contact. I've got an easy 20 years on most of them and I'm staring a thin crust pear, goat cheese and arugula pizza that's starting to congeal.
“Sure, call me when you have time,” I say. If I'm not having a sudden bout of diarrhea I might answer.
I first met Lena in Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. We were both working on a USAID funded project designed to encourage democracy in the former Soviet Republic by pretending that the upcoming presidential election wouldn't be stolen. (It was stolen, but the Georgians were good enough to throw a revolution afterward, giving us consultants a crack at additional funding for encouraging democracy under the new regime.)
Lena's ex-boyfriend was supposed to be the lead trainer on the broadcast portion of the project, but he managed to alienate the boss, a woman who said I reminded her of her father. The jilted project lead responded to my status as teacher's pet by finding ways to screw me that would have never even occurred to the great whore of Babylon.
But I digress. To most ordinary Americans, one of the most striking things about Tbilisi is that nobody speaks English or any other western language, so after I said good morning, inquired after the toilet and ordered a beer, I pretty much turned into a mime.
So I'd been thrilled when multilingual Lena invited me to meet her for dinner at a khachapuri and boiled meat joint near Freedom Square in Tbilisi.
The restaurant accommodates the linguistically challenged with a menu offering literal English translations – offerings translated as “stuffed guts” and “boiled meat pouches;” so you can point at the words on the menu and something usually arrives.
I was seated at a table promptly at the appointed hour – always a mistake, but after decades in broadcasting I was physically incapable of missing a deadline no matter how trivial. Lena hadn't arrived, so I ordered a beer - “deme Argo ludi” produces a half liter of something yellow, fizzy and about 16 proof.
I called Lena's cell phone after I emptied the first bottle. It rang maybe 20 times. No voice mail, no answer.
Over the next three beers I called perhaps 20 times. When I saw her the next day she said, “Total brain fart – I dropped my cell phone at the office – and I was so tired I just fell out and slept right through dinner.”
It might have been true, but I would have a lot rather had her say she was smoking crack with the CIA attache at the embassy and lost track of time.
Seriously, if you're going to stand someone up, you should at least have the common decency to make up an entertaining excuse. Something like: “An aboriginal tribe elected me goddess of the week and refused let me leave until I finished puking up the ceremonial paté;” or perhaps: “Raoul had me tied to the bed and absolutely refused to let me loose until he . . .well, let's just say he's such a boy.”
If you're calling in sick when you just need a mental health day off, tell your boss that your dengue fever flared up again, or perhaps you're having a bad bout of quoits. Yes, quoits is a game, not a disease; but it's a more credible-sounding excuse than projectile diarrhea.
Sorry if this sounds like I just phoned it in and didn't bother to edit. You see my dear departed mother came to me in a vision prattling on and on about how I need to start getting more fiber in my diet and, what am I going to do, tell the spirit of the woman who gave me life to bugger off because I have a blog to attend to?
She doesn't always stand me up; but I know, sooner or later, I'll be sitting somewhere waiting for her, and when I text or call to find out where she is I'll hear, “Thank God you called, I got a new phone and none of the numbers transferred.”
“So let me guess, you're having an emergency kidney transplant,” I say. My second guess would be a plumbing problem, the same sort of thing people do when they call in sick and claim they have diarrhea because they don't want to expend the energy required to fake a tubercular cough.
“My toilet just absolutely exploded an hour ago,” Lena said. “I've got to wait for the plumber.”
What are the odds? Honestly, before she told me, I'd have bet even money and thrown in a plunger.
“Is it okay if I call you back in a while?” she asks.
I'm sitting in a brew pub in Northwest Portland surrounded by people whose friends did show up. Most of them are laughing. Some are making thigh contact. I've got an easy 20 years on most of them and I'm staring a thin crust pear, goat cheese and arugula pizza that's starting to congeal.
“Sure, call me when you have time,” I say. If I'm not having a sudden bout of diarrhea I might answer.
I first met Lena in Tbilisi, the capital of the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. We were both working on a USAID funded project designed to encourage democracy in the former Soviet Republic by pretending that the upcoming presidential election wouldn't be stolen. (It was stolen, but the Georgians were good enough to throw a revolution afterward, giving us consultants a crack at additional funding for encouraging democracy under the new regime.)
Lena's ex-boyfriend was supposed to be the lead trainer on the broadcast portion of the project, but he managed to alienate the boss, a woman who said I reminded her of her father. The jilted project lead responded to my status as teacher's pet by finding ways to screw me that would have never even occurred to the great whore of Babylon.
But I digress. To most ordinary Americans, one of the most striking things about Tbilisi is that nobody speaks English or any other western language, so after I said good morning, inquired after the toilet and ordered a beer, I pretty much turned into a mime.
So I'd been thrilled when multilingual Lena invited me to meet her for dinner at a khachapuri and boiled meat joint near Freedom Square in Tbilisi.
The restaurant accommodates the linguistically challenged with a menu offering literal English translations – offerings translated as “stuffed guts” and “boiled meat pouches;” so you can point at the words on the menu and something usually arrives.
I was seated at a table promptly at the appointed hour – always a mistake, but after decades in broadcasting I was physically incapable of missing a deadline no matter how trivial. Lena hadn't arrived, so I ordered a beer - “deme Argo ludi” produces a half liter of something yellow, fizzy and about 16 proof.
I called Lena's cell phone after I emptied the first bottle. It rang maybe 20 times. No voice mail, no answer.
Over the next three beers I called perhaps 20 times. When I saw her the next day she said, “Total brain fart – I dropped my cell phone at the office – and I was so tired I just fell out and slept right through dinner.”
It might have been true, but I would have a lot rather had her say she was smoking crack with the CIA attache at the embassy and lost track of time.
Seriously, if you're going to stand someone up, you should at least have the common decency to make up an entertaining excuse. Something like: “An aboriginal tribe elected me goddess of the week and refused let me leave until I finished puking up the ceremonial paté;” or perhaps: “Raoul had me tied to the bed and absolutely refused to let me loose until he . . .well, let's just say he's such a boy.”
If you're calling in sick when you just need a mental health day off, tell your boss that your dengue fever flared up again, or perhaps you're having a bad bout of quoits. Yes, quoits is a game, not a disease; but it's a more credible-sounding excuse than projectile diarrhea.
Sorry if this sounds like I just phoned it in and didn't bother to edit. You see my dear departed mother came to me in a vision prattling on and on about how I need to start getting more fiber in my diet and, what am I going to do, tell the spirit of the woman who gave me life to bugger off because I have a blog to attend to?
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)