The Fifth of February Fisticuffs

Okay, you see, I'm not here.  Got that said so let's go on to the rest of the story, about you, me and the me who's not me who's not here.  Then we'll make it complicated later on.

I had just poured myself a shot of Bushmills white label Irish whiskey, the kind John recommended when my wife and I visited he and his wife in their cottage above Lough Derg a few years ago (good to see you again at the airport today, John - hard to believe your boy is 14 years young and taller than a stalk of wild ribbon grass).  Sure, I could've had some Lynchburg mash or Kentucky fermented charcoal juice but I had the bottle in front of me, a dead writer to mourn, and what I tought was a quiet evening at home with the cats.

I carried the whiskey into the study, leaving the cats to soak up the heat from the old Kerosun kerosene heater toasting spider webs in the living room.  'Twas going to be a nice night for writing a few 'thank you' notes to the neighbours for thinking good thoughts and prayers about our eldest neighbours next door to me, the missus having a bit of breathing problems and needing a few nights' rest in the local hospital.

Then there came a rapping on the door.  Three large taps.  Loud, they were.  Like someone was going to reach me no matter if I was ten stories down in my hidden subbasement labora...well, anyway, as if I was unavailable.

Being dressed for the evening in my finest house clothes - a pair of Guinness sleep pants, a work shirt and a pullover/zipup sweater - I hesitated going to the front door.  What if is was them?  You know, "THEM"!!!!  Okay, enough for the melodrama.  I'll be serious for a moment.  Or shall I?  Well, what if it was whoever it is it isn't supposed to be?

It was.  Or it wasn't.  What it was was my neighbour, Baunivonne.  Baunivonne and I share an unsordid past so it's not like I'm going to spill the beans about something sorta sordid.  Instead, it's the future we were to share or the past from this moment looking back that I'm here to tell you about.  But in the past before that she and I shared one experience: we had the same home builder, a young man reluctantly following his father's footsteps in the house construction/repair business, she and he being...  But that's all in the past, isn't it?

Baunivonne stared at me when I answered the door.  Her eyes said one thing clearly, "It's colder than ice melting off the face of the embarrassed scientist who quoted a primary school student's report on the slowly melting career of Paul Michael Glaser and extrapolated the end of the world therefrom."  The thermometer, I imagined from our frosty breaths, would fortune a guess of a temperature in the -3 to -5 deg C range.

"Rick, I was passing by our neighbours' house, seeing if their missus was home.  She wasn't so I tought I'd wander further down the lane to your house and let you know she's not there."

"Thanks."

Her eyes continued to say she expected me to courteously invite her in, both of us stamping our feet on the rotting boards of my front deck to keep warm and test for termites in freezing weather.

"Me-ow.  Me cold," our cat Merlin cried from the open doorway, his thin Cornish Rex fur not exactly mutated for subbacolda weather.

Baunivonne changed the expression on her framed face (what was she framed for?  Nothing serious.  Eyeglasses, mainly.)  "Uh, that your cat?"

"Yep, this one's Merlin and that one in there is Erin."

"In there?"

"Uh-huh."

"Nice and toasty and warm and out of the cold?"

"Indeed."

"With us freezing our butts out here in the cold?"

"Absolutely."

She shivered, her gray, shoulder-length, no-fuss hair shaking like a feather duster.  Her expression hinted at the "There's clueless and then there's Rick" line of thinking.

I nodded and agreed with her almost-thought.  I decided to keep the conversation going.  "So, who you think's gonna win the game on Sunday?"

"The game?  Oh yeah.  Well, I'm a Saints fan going way back but the Colts sure seem to have it together this year.  I bet you're pulling for the Colts.  Or should I say Peyton Manning?"

"Well, sure, he's quarterbacking a good team and all..."

"No, I mean you being a Tennessee fan."

"Of course I'm pulling for Peyton.  He's a good-humoured kid with a well-balanced family.  His wife's doing good work.  What more could I ask for?"

"A Super Bowl win?"

"Yeah, until he wins another one I guess folks will keep comparing him to that three-ring circus clown...what's his name?"

"Tom Brady?"

"No, I mean Emmett Kelly.  Or is it P.T. Barnum they keep comparing him to?"

"You probably mean Brett Favre."

"What is it about those boys from Mississippi whose bodies won't quit?  Look at Archie.  He lasted how long with an average Saints team?"

"A long time.  Hey, you ever wonder why we're the kind of neighbours who don't go to each other's house two or three times a week for a hot cup of coffee?"

"Umm..."

"Or just show up uninvited and get asked in for a steaming cup of tea?"

"Well..."

"Or just call each other up and have a phone conversation for the hell of it?"

"Now that you mention..."

"Or just stand here like now with icy breaths and no clue what's going on?"

"I suppose.  You still rescuing cats?"

"My husband found one abandoned at an apartment complex down in Jacksonville and brought it home for me.  It's part Maine coon.  You think your cats would invite it in and be kind to it for no other reason than to at least be neighbourly, let alone offer it something to drink or eat?  It's not like it's going to offer its firstborn son to them or anything."

"Well, they've been neutered so that won't be a problem."

"[They the only ones who've been neutered?]"

"What did you say?"

"Oh, nothing.  Look, I'll let you know if I hear anything more about the missus next-door.  And thanks again for letting me know about her.  We neighbours should really pay more attention to each other as we get older, you know, with our needs and wants changing with the passing years."

"I know what you mean.  How long have we lived here?"

"I moved here in 1985."

"We moved here in 1987."

"Twenty-five and twenty-three years ago...amazing.  In all that time, I don't ever think I've been in your house."

"And I haven't been in yours."

"Doesn't that seem strange to you?"

"Yeah, I guess it does."

"Doesn't it seem something easy to fix?"

"You're right.  I ought to stop by your house and visit sometime.  Maybe see that new cat of yours."

"Yeah, I guess that's what would fix it, all right.  Not like I could come over to your place and step inside for a few minutes to get warm before I walked back to my place."

"I could see why you wouldn't want to do that, too."

"I wouldn't?"

"Yeah, I mean you intended to visit our neighbours..."

"Who've let me in their house once or twice in 25 years!"

"...And you took a few minutes out of your walk to give me an update.  I know how that is.  It breaks your concentration and changes your focus from your main objective.  I bet you're ready to get back to your place and warm up."

"That's exactly what I'm thinking...warming up right now."

"Well, Baunivonne, give me an update if you find out anything."

"Yeah, I might call you tomorrow from work, if that's okay with you."

"Sure."

"You wouldn't consider that intruding if I called you at home, with you sitting in your warm house?"

"Not at all.  Talk to you then."

"Thanks.  I'll try not to freeze to death before I get back to my house."

"Be careful.  And thanks for stopping by."

= = =

Now, that's the sort of conversation we've all had, one party saying one thing, the other party not hearing anything but the words and missing all the subtle phrasing, intonation, body language and previous history which would've helped put together a picture that even partially resembles what the first party intended.  It's the same everywhere.  I see it all the time, in politics (with China and the U.S. puffing up their chests and blowing out hot air about respect and territory and integrity when what they're really saying is something else entirely that only the cold winds of diplomacy can decipher properly (which is basically that the old deal's no longer any good and the new deal's getting foul-smelling a little too quickly for the next round of negotiations to have any hope of making the next few deals go smoothly)), in business (where a certain global entity has forgotten that distribution economies of scale mean nothing if certain products in the distribution channels have no meaning to the changing buying patterns of their customers/suppliers) and entertainment (where worldwide sports like soccer and rugby have long ago figured out how to put valuable adverts in the game to pay for their fans' viewing habits on the tellie (all but fans in America, that is)).

There's a funny picture I'm seeing, looking at an old map of our world.  Since you can't yet use my eyes and brain to see the world, I'll draw the picture with words for you.  It's this, you see.  Our world is shrinking, collapsing in on itself.  I'm no scientist but I seem to remember a spinning spherical body that gets smaller tends to grow denser and spins faster.  Doesn't that mean its gravitational pull gets stronger (the average pull, that is, with the usual lows and highs of planetary gravitational fields for you to chart out on your personal home world simulation computer)?  No, I'm sure I'm wrong - I bet I got that information from some popsci book or movie like "2010: The Year We Got LASIK and Gave Up Contacts" starring Roy 'I never bled to death from multiple shark bites' Scheider.

Did you see the light shows in Earth's sky recently?  Would you want to see more?  I'm not sure if I would.  Some "asteroids" are incompatible with what I want our species to accomplish in years to come.  I don't want some extraterrestrial runaway train to come crashing down on my party two or three thousand years from now.  I wonder if I could pull in a few more "asteroid" hits?  Of course, I don't control everything.  I just report what I see and what I think I see I know.  Those who tell me what they say they know is what I don't know if I believe is true, being the gullible type I am.  However, when enough of what they pass on to me in their clandestine, cloak-and-dagger game of hide-and-seek so that no one knows who passed these nuggets of information to me turns out to be true, then I keep finding ways to spin little stories around this stuff to keep me hungry for more amour.  You know that, of course.  It's love that keeps us together.  Else, instead of writing this you'd find me breaking a golf club over my knee in frustration of missing another nine 200-yd holes-in-one in a row or snapping my fishing pole in two because I couldn't reel in the last 20-tonne, eight-legged whale ray in the ocean, having to cut the line before I sank the Queen Mary ocean liner I'd borrowed for just such a fishing trip.

Until next time.  I've got a kitchen to stock up for the big game.  No, not the Super Bowl - I've got a Wal-Mart, Publix, Discount Food Mart and Mary's beer store within walking distance for that Miami smashmouth mosh pit.  Instead, I'm talking about the Ireland rugby team's match to be lit and fired up soon.  If I gave you a ha'penny, would you die for Ireland, little soldiers?  To be in Limerick at South's again, with John, John, and the rest of the gang - that's a sight to be rich for - we'd spend more than a ha'penny on pints, that's for sure.  When the children have no shoes on their feet, we'll still have Munster rugby in Ireland while the NFL players in America go on strike about forgetting why they can't remember who they are after being told to run at each other's heads like battering rams with little to protect them from concussive blows but padding made of modern chemicals instead of the leather of previous generations.  In all cases, use your heads wisely, folks.  You've only got one brain - pickle it with care.