Right, the
son of a newspaperman am I, so, was I going to be defeated by what never
existed until the last years of my father’s life? Shouldn’t I be able to find
something, anything, to write about?
He would
have been 105, three days before that day (Wednesday,) and he died nearly
twenty years ago, but here’s today’s secret, Dear Readers: it gets better, yes,
but never to the point of best. Which means that, yes, I no longer weep when I
see a wok (Jack was an excellent Chinese cook), and I’m glad that he got out of
the world as he did: fast and painless, with not too much deterioration. Life
makes you philosophical, and the icon giving the option to go on indefinitely
can’t be found on the desktop. So you might as well go when you still have most
of your faculties, and life isn’t too onerous. But that said, his absence turns
up, once in a while, and then I miss him.
Wednesday,
for example, he showed up at The Poet’s Passage,
the café / craft shop where I work, and where the Internet had decided to take
a prolonged cigarette break. I was delivering rice and beans to Naïa, the
daughter of the owner, whom I had seen and who was going off to get her child
the rice and beans. Since I myself was going for rice and beans, it was no
problem to get an extra order.
Naïa, of
course, is completely unfazed by Marc arriving with the food instead of her
mother. And also completely in character, she has a joke:
“What do
you call a mad flea?”
I know it’s
going to be bad.
“OK—tell
me.”
“A
lunatic!”
I’m about
to protest that a tick is hardly a flea, but guess what? The damage is done,
and Naïa is a girl who has never once ventured down the doll aisle of a toy
store. Instead, she heads straight for insects—in which I believe—or
dinosaurs—in which I don’t. So that means that not only is she twelve, but
she’ll probably win.
“How can
you not believe in dinosaurs,” she said, when I presented my belief.
“Never seen
one,” I said, and braced myself for the inevitable.
“And have
you ever seen a tick, “ I said, hoping to deflect the argument, and she
professed that she had—one had been venturing across the inner landscape of
Lorca’s ear. (Lorca being the toy Chihuahua…)
So we
talked about that, and discussed proper tick-removal schemes: you can’t pull
them out if they’re embedded. Then I asked what she had done with the tick.
“Flushed it
down the toilet,” she said.
“A
singularly uncreative thing to do with a perfectly good tick,” I said.
“Yeah? What
would you have done with a tick?”
“In fact,
there is a long history of inventive uses of ticks in my family,” I told her,
since first it was true, and anyway, there was no Internet.
Eric walks
into the café.
“There was
my brother Eric, who was engaged to an genteel lady from Pittsburgh: her father
was a cardiologist, her mother hung out with the Carnegies and the Mellons. So
what happened when Eric found a tick on him, one weekend after having been out
in the woods? Well, he went to the jewelry store, got a ring box, deposited the
tick on the cotton, and then had them wrap it up. Then he left it on her desk
at the Daily Cardinal, the student newspaper where they both worked.”
The
marriage ended in divorce.
Naïa, of
course, doesn’t see that. Eric definitely picked the wrong girl….
“Then there
was my father, who had also been out in the woods, and who had to interview the
president of the Bank of Madison.”
Historical
note—there was a time, Dear Reader, when banks had perfectly sensible names,
before they began to call themselves MadBank, or whatever.
Jack walks
into the café.
“Well, the
president of the bank was young, and very pompous, and treating Mr. Newhouse
with great formality, which generally tended to be wasted on Jack. So the prez
left the room, which was a good thing, since Jack had begun to feel that really
awful feeling: something strolling across his scalp. So there my father was,
holding the tick in his hand. And then he heard footsteps.”
“So what
did he do?’ asked Naïa.
“He must
had had Mercury blossoming all over his astrological chart,” I told her, “since
he knew immediately what to do. He leaned forward and dropped the black tick on
a white piece of paper on the president’s desk.”
“Then what
happened,” asked Naïa.
“Well, he
waited for the situation to evolve. And then he saw the president start, and
reach out to grab the paper. But Jack wasn’t having any of that!”
“So what
did he do?”
“He leaned
forward and said, ‘is that a TICK on your desk?’ So then the president got
really nervous and said ‘Oh, I’m terribly sorry, I’m afraid I don’t know!’ He
should just have laughed, of course, but he got rattled. So Jack leaned farther
forward and said, “well, any damn fool can see that that’s a TICK!” And now,
Jack couldn’t help it, and began saying things like, ‘do you mean to tell me
your bank has TICKS!’ and ‘have you ever had an infestation of TICKS before?!’
So of course the president got completely rattled.”
“So then
what happened,” Naïa wants to know.
“Well, Jack
finished the interview and went across the street to have a cup of coffee
behind the front window of the diner. And guess what happened, twenty minutes
later?”
“What?”
“Three
trucks from Oliver Exterminating roared up in from of the bank. And the guys
came out running, like HazMat
guys going after a bomb!”
Naïa is
completely unimpressed. Right, I realize it wasn’t much of a story.
Unless, of
course, you had known Jack….
Family is
funny, I thought. People come in and out, die, turn up unexpectedly, and go
away again. And then, sometimes, people just turn up.
“Marc, I
don’t know how to say this,” said Lady, Naïa’s mother.
This is
rarely a good sentence to hear.
“You’re one
of my closest friends,” she says simply.
“You’re my
sister,” I say, without thinking. That’s when you know it’s true.
We kiss.
Then I head off to the café.
Naïa has to
have her rice and beans.
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