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My father and his two brothers all had chronic back problems. Sometimes, at family gatherings, if you walked into our living room you would have seen three unable to stand men in tuxedos stretched out supine on the floor, staring at the ceiling while chain smoking Rothmans, guzzling tumblers of scotch, boasting about real estate and debating whether to stock the pond with speckled or rainbow trout that year. Sparkling in evening gowns, their high on gin wives would kneel down from time to time to pop a smoked oyster in their mouths.
After a month of agonizing and consulting his bolder buddies, the little red-haired kid finally gathered enough gumption to approach the girl he had a crush on. Not so pretty, mom, but really smart so, you know. He asked if she’d go out with him. She said he wasn’t her type (but that, apparently, some punk with a perpetually runny nose was). Then, in an astonishing display of wherewithal, the kid went around to every girl in the schoolyard, saying, ‘hey, you want to go out with me? No? No problem. How about you? Or you. Want to go out with me?’
In the summer, when I was little, my aunt Barbara used to rise in the night, still asleep, put on her fur coat, and drive into town for ice cream. Usually orange pineapple.
The little red-haired kid and his friend Alfred have decided that they will not go out with any girl who only likes them for their looks.
I once met a man whose favourite colour was beige. He spent his Sundays creating a database for his VCR collection. He smuggled pink, coconut covered marshmallows into the house and fed them to his daughters on the sly. His wife did not love him but revelled in alluding to his mother’s (by then faded) celebrity.
A client e-mailed me today to ask whether I’d finished translating a document they hadn’t yet sent me.
God, I love Dean Allen.
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Comment
- I love your aunt Barbara. My mother once went into a Dairy Queen for an ice cream cake and came out with the cake and a cone for each of us “because it’s a long drive home.”
— cmb May 26, 3:44pm # - By the haemorrhoids of Gustav Mahler, that’s the grousest post I’ve read in ages. Too many blogs are written by people who either don’t notice or don’t remember this kind of stuff. Thank you with a block of finest dark chocolate. Mine evening is made.
— Disinterested observer Jun 1, 3:58am # - It’s nice to know this ridiculous attachment I have to romance is vindicated on occasion. Bless you and your boyo for the love you share… especially when many speak the word “love” as though it were mercury on their tongues.
— roggey Jun 2, 2:09pm #
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