Ring around the rosy

Words are important to me.

But it’s funny - no, it’s strange; no, it’s peculiar;

no, it’s hard; no, it’s …

What is important to me?

Ring around the rosy,

A pocketful of poesies,

ashes, ashes,

we all fall down.

Words are a way for me to explain to you what I am thinking. If you think I have simply said something obvious here, then you probably haven’t yet understood what I am trying to say. There is, of course, an obvious way you could read and understand these words if you wanted to.

These words? Which words?

But what I am trying to precisely get at is more this two-edged sword thing. But we don’t use swords anymore. So how is it that you can possibly understand what I mean when I use a word like ‘sword?’ And now I’m not even sure about ‘word.’

We infer a great deal. We guess. We imagine. We think and we are often mistaken.

All I am trying to say here can easily and not easily be summed up in words. Getting some words down, right, gives you a chance to try to understand what is important to me. Oh wait a minute …

Testing, testing,

is this thing on?

I was alone the other evening. Don’t get me wrong, there were people around. But I was aware that it was just me – not really connected to anyone else at that particular moment. I’m married – twenty-seven years, so far. I have friends and family.

I suppose you should be thinking that I don’t really need so many words to tell you about what is after all a very common feeling. But that’s just it.

I walked down to Aimee’s – a café and coffee house on Mass Street. When I walked in, I saw that Bailie was there. She saw me. She was composing a grilled cheese sandwich for a young man who was sitting in the middle swivel chair up at the high counter. I think he might have been wearing a light pink shirt. He had dark hair.

Bailie asked if I could wait a minute and I said that I could. Somebody must have said something about the weather. Probably all three of us. It’s hardly important.

After Bailie had placed the sandwich in the grill with a spray of cooking oil for good measure, she came up to me.

I suppose you know how all this works. She used words. I used words. Money went from my hand to hers. She laughed at the clunk of a coin hitting the bottom of a nearly empty tip jar. If only I could enchant you with all the mundane details.

I took a few steps up to the high counter with my can of root beer and my book and I sat down on the swivel chair at the outside end of the stainless steel-topped counter. I almost bumped my knee getting in. Bailie handed me a red plastic glass with ice in it. She smiled, just barely, when she asked if that was enough. I teased back that I knew where she worked if I wanted more and I tipped the glass to the side and poured the root beer slowly over the ice into the glass.

It helped that I was in no particular hurry. No place else I would rather be. Nothing much else that I needed to do. The young man, whose name I never got, was shuffling the newspaper. Turns out this was his first day off in eight. He trims produce and such at the Dillon’s on Wakarusa. I informed him that I had never been to that Dillon’s store, but never mind. Turns out he graduated with a degree in art from Sterling College and had run at the track at Tabor, the school where I had gone briefly and dropped out years earlier.

Bailie had to tell him that they seemed to be out of tomato soup. That the special for the day was grilled cheese and tomato soup seemed to be both an explanation and an embarrassment. But truly, all these words spoken between the three of us were so small and inconsequential - and yet they mattered enough to be said - and likely soon forgotten.

Bailie started in on my club sandwich. Lightly toasted bread, some squirts of mayo, and layer after layer of what would be not quite entirely empty words if I bothered to write them down here until she had to stick tall skewers all the way through so that she could slice through it all with a large knife, finally lifting the quarters of the sandwich into a paper lined basket, adding a scoop and a bit more of potato salad.

I suppose I shouldn’t have mentioned, and now I will, that she laid a piece of lettuce down as a bed for the potato salad. And almost not said, was her momentary hesitation when she reached for chips, and then her memory altered with just the tiniest flicker on her face.

I didn’t watch Bailie the whole time that she worked. There were silences between us. There was a phone call for some people meeting at a table behind me. I read some from my book.

She handed me the basket with my club sandwich and potato salad. I ate and I sipped at my root beer. The young man sitting to my right left. I chatted a bit with Bailie and it turned out there were some things I didn’t know about her. For someone who I barely know, it still matters a little bit to me that we spoke of those passing things.

It’s funny. I think it’s interesting – and funny – I guess I should have said – and better late than never – I think it’s something that I stopped being aware that I was alone when I pushed through Aimee’s door and Bailie said something to me.

It was a good sandwich. And I noticed it was a beautiful, cool evening as I walked home. I fed the cat – scratched her under her chin. Put a movie on the TV. My wife came home and we all fall down.

From 'Little Bird'