It’s an old chair. A well-used chair. In the dining room, it seated its share of guests and heard a quota of secrets, while providing measured comfort. The chair occupied the nursery for decades, a cushy seat for the nursemaid when she wasn’t walking the floor with a colicky infant.
That was you.
After the nursery became a study, the chair had a grand refurbishing in burgundy velvet. It sat under a bright lamp, digesting scholarly papers while your father snored. Trapped in the attic, there’s a mouse nesting in its seat.
Recover it. For the baby’s room. It’s yours.
Published online in The Dribble Drabble Review, Second Issue October 2020
Bert’s Berth, in Sleepy Hollow, is where Ichabod Crane bunks between late night rides. It’s quiet, since Bert’s doesn’t have much in the way of a lunch crowd. Around three in the afternoon, the pub scene starts. There’s beer, stout and ale on tap. Twenty four different kinds of quench, all told. Half are bottled and a third are obscure. Ichabod takes dinner in his room. At ten pm, he slips out. He stops in for a hot toddy around four am. It’s a small group by then. Most of the guys are off their heads. Ichabod fits right in.
Beats and Barts are both slangy guys. Beats hang in coffee houses reading obscure poems. They wear black jeans, and turtlenecks, and maybe berets.
Barts are regular Joes. Not the coffee kind of joe. They dress
casual, cool, and colorful. They’re likely to play pick-up basketball
and treat everyone to ice cream afterwards.
How can these two men intersect? They’re father and son. Or a woman is involved, one who time travels from the fifties to now. A feminist before feminism found itself. Imagine, she realizes that her poet isn’t woke. She walks into another dimension. There’s conflict either way.
Word Ladder, Death and Taxes, will continue next week.
We left Paris on Easter of 2015, after ten days of being tourists.
Though we hadn’t intended to, we witnessed the veneration of relics
from the passion of Christ ̶
the crown of thorns, a piece of wood and a nail from the cross ̶
at Notre Dame Cathedral. This is how that happened. My husband and I
were standing in an apse, whispering about how difficult it would be
for photo recognition software to distinguish between the apostles
pictured in the stained glass ̶
their faces are virtually the same ̶
when a deacon indicated we should move and shushed us with a finger
to the lip. A little puzzled, we complied. Looking around, we saw a
procession moving along the aisle. A priest (most likely the bishop)
held aloft a reliquary containing the glinting gold crown. Assistants
on either side held the other relics. For about twenty minutes, they
moved slowly through the church as people crossed themselves and
bowed their heads.
It is this scene that came to mind when I heard on the radio a few
days ago that Notre Dame was burning. My first thought was to hope
that it was not the result of a terrorist attack. Following the story
in the news during the next few days, I was relieved to hear that the
fire was accidental. As information has come in, it seems that
someone miscalculated. Things got out of control. Often they do. This
might be true for political conflagrations as well. If so, let’s hope
that we can get those under control and that a respect for the
accomplishments of the past can rescue the future. Notre Dame has
been rescued and rebuilt several times.
The Easter Week commemorations for Good Friday and Holy Saturday
will be held at Sainte Sulpice and Easter Mass will be celebrated at
Sainte Eustache. Sunday organ concerts are held each week at Sainte
Sulpice, though I’ve never been. The organ at Sainte Eustache is is
quite powerful. I’ve heard it. The seating is spartan, consisting of
folding chairs. But this is true of most churches we visited in
Paris.
The organ at Notre Dame was spared from fire by a stone roof. When we were there in 2015, a sign was posted on a collection box requesting donations to make a few repairs to that organ. Perhaps now that people have opened their pocketbooks to rebuild the cathedral, the organ can be restored completely. This is how things progress, in fits and starts, forwards and backwards, with a crisis often required to concentrate the mind.
The Queen of Hearts did heat some tarts. Baked them in an oven, ten minutes at four hundred then three hundred fifty until brown and bubbly. It was an old family recipe passed down from Aunt Alice before she died and after all was forgiven.
The young Red Queen did vary the ingredients using, for instance, flamingo and mushrooms. That one pinked up nicely, the juices oozing from the vents. Red also made a nutter pie, chock full of died in the wool ideologues. The Cheshire Cat always attended the tea, accompanied by the Mad Hatter. They never grow old.
A heath hike is full of surprises for the observant. Quiet! Do you hear a tittering in the bush there. It’s noisy under that blanket. Don’t be so nosy. Maybe it’s children or birds, in heather or tare, not secretive lovers panting. Imagine hide and seek games or the rattle of empty seeds. Take a minute away from the world. Avert your eyes. Give them some privacy. It’s no more than you’d want on a cool spring day in the middle of April, after the lambs are shorn and before the wool is knit into sweater gifts for the holidays.
The whole thing started when Joe
decided to do his taxes. He got himself a mug of coffee and poured in
a little Irish whiskey left from St Patrick’s Day. Stirring in sugar,
he took a sip and decided it was just the thing for an afternoon of
crunching the numbers. He whipped up cream and spooned it on top.
Carrying it into his study, he sat in front of the computer and
opened his tax software. Three hours later, he was finished. He had a
heart attack when he saw the bottom line. His wife blamed the whipped
cream.
In 2020, as foretold in the Bible, the
lion lay down with the lamb. Potentially bringing peace to the United
States, Congress gave the vote to citizens 16 years and older. The
bill also permits presidential candidates as young as 21. Taken
together, these measures promise change in a country that has been
divided for too long.
In other news, under indictment for
fulfilling a campaign promise to shoot someone on Fifth Avenue,
President Trump will not seek re-election.
Citing the biblical injunction that, “a
child shall lead them,” the remaining adult in the room, Mike
Pence, won’t run either.
Lambs are eating the wet sheets from the line when we return from a rambling hike through country lanes. They’ve pushed through the fence. They ignore shooing movements. Seven of them seem to be communicating via Bluetooth. As soon as one backs away, another takes it’s place.
We don’t reason with them. Four abreast we move like a wave, banging pots and wooden spoons, hoping to get them through the hole where they came in. They make noise, a bleating chorus. We expect the farmer who rented us the cottage will come to see if we’re poaching. No such luck.
A lion stands guard over the wooden
blocks. He’s a trusted friend, that lion. Never locked away in the
zoo with the others, he might well hold the key to the city. At
night, he sleeps in a child’s bed, curled close enough to catch the
drool of sleep. His ear has been chewed and his fur is matted where
he’s been loved too much. He never goes in the washer. It would ruin
him, ruin the smell that makes him special, sog the stuffing so he
wouldn’t dry in time get to work. Who would keep things safe, then?
Monica's Monday Morning Flash 