Acquiring distance

So m'wife and I are off and away tomorrow, heading up to Mendocino for a wedding. Where I am to be Shannon's Best Person, so my Friday-time is largely blocked in already with rehearsals and such. So m'wife is already making plans to whisk off my bestest friends from England somewhere else to have more fun without me; to which the only reasonable response is to make sure that the verymost fun is had at the rehearsals and such. As it happens, my only duty on the day is to make sure that the bride drinks enough to be thoroughly relaxed and happy, while remaining sober enough to say her vows and mean them*; I am perfectly prepared to practise this all day on Friday, until we get it right.

In other news, I am not as we know a listmaker, but I thought I'd make a list of everything I have to do today.

Feed hummingbirds
Brief petsitter
Finish proofs of Bitter Waters (65 55 45 35 pages to go)
Dash to Walgreen's for scrips
Make lunch for two
Make dinner for eight
Fetch cases from the clubhouse
Laundry
More laundry
Pack
Charge Fitbit
Charge camera batteries
Charge more camera batteries
Charge Kindle

(Actually, to be fair I have already done much of the work for dinner: there's a tri-tip in the slow cooker, rubbed with garlic and ginger and chipotle and smoked paprika, sitting on a bed of onion and carrot and celery with a splash of red wine. Ten hours of that, I think it ought to be worth eating. Spuds and savoy cabbage on the side, prob'ly, because they're easy.)


*As it happens, this is the selfsame role that Helen ( m'aforementioned bestest friend from England) fulfilled with striking success at our own wedding, keeping me cheerfully topped up with fizz all morning and half the afternoon; I would emulate her exactly, if only I could remember how she did it...

Life: just one damn thing after another

I suppose this is just the human condition writ down, but every time I get to cross one thing off the list in the previous post, I get to add two things to it. It's like a reverse of Xeno's Paradox, where the end is always, always further off than it was before, and so - for the reverse, of course, is always the same coin - one can indeed never reach it.

This must be why I don't make lists?

Time: what stops everything happening at once. Or ever.

As the tasks finally dwindle, the time available runs out, even as time required builds up for the remaining tasks. Aaargh. The dash to Walgreen's took me more than an hour, what with standing in three lines and having to wait twenty minutes betweentimes. (NB to self, pharmacists have the patience of saints, and you should be more appreciative; also, that guy couldn't really have been called Roger Sir Toenail, but that is what I heard him say. Twice. [Brian-the-pharmacist may have heard the same thing, as he did ask him to repeat it])

I have decreed that it is now Wine O'Clock, whatever the timepiece actually is reading. And I need to proof more pages, more and more.

Here, have a darling. This is the opening of "'Tis Pity He's Ashore" (a pun I actually perpetrated as a schoolboy, and held close for almost forty years before I had a chance to use it):

“Sailor Martin. You should not be here.”

The voice came from the tangle of shadows in the back of the shop. It was
salt-abraded, familiar, unchanging. Live long enough, go far enough, you will find
those things that never change: the places, the people, the truths.

Not many of them, and not all are welcoming or welcome, but still: they
stand like islands in the sea, islands in the storm.

Johnnie was, is, always will be one of those. Johnnie calls himself a chandler,
and that’s as dishonest as he’s ever been. Johnnie sells much that came from the
sea, but nothing that’s useful to a sailor, nothing that any boat should ever want
or need.

Johnnie and I, we’ve got history. He likes to say I’m his best customer.
Sometimes I think I’m his only customer. The shop is a collection, more a museum
than a place of exchange. The only trade is inward. Johnnie loves to buy, if a thing
is rare or dark or strange enough; he hates to sell. Except perhaps to me.

“You should be afloat,” he said. “Stood well off, in deep water. Bad weather
coming.”

I knew it, I could feel it: a tension all through the city from harbour to
highrise, a breathless unease, a readiness. Not only for the typhoon in the offing,
though that was the reason I’d put in. Any other trouble I preferred to meet at
sea, but delivering a billionaire’s new yacht to KL, I thought I’d best not turn her
up storm-toss’d.

“What do you hear, Johnnie?”

“I hear everything. You know this.”

Of course I knew. The true question was what do you believe?—which of course
he would never tell me, and I could never believe him if he did.

This was how we dealt with each other, in hints and doubts and rumours.
It was how he dealt with everybody. Even his name was not Johnnie. That was
a joke, perhaps, or several jokes. Surabaya Johnnie for obvious reasons; Rubber
Johnnie because he always bounced back; Johnnie-come-lately because he had
been here on this waterfront, in this store for ever. I could attest to that.

For a man his age he was still robust, still unrepentant, and some of his teeth
were still his own. The cracked and ancient ivories, those few. The gold ones,
mostly not: he mortgaged them at need. A man needs negotiable wealth, and his
stock-in-trade won’t serve if he will never agree to sell it. I held lien over one of
those teeth myself, from the last time I’d touched port.

“Go back to sea,” he said, “sailor.”

I shook my head. “Not until the storm blows over.” That, or something other.

“Well, then. Come here. I have a thing for you.”