(18 weeks)
TUESDAY.
I’m on the phone with Tony.
“Ever feel slightly off?” he asks. “But only slightly. Like your T-shirt’s on backwards or something.”
“I often wear my T-shirts backwards on purpose,” I say. “It makes me feel like with each step I’m travelling back into the past. Ah, the past! That’s where regrets are born.”
“Plus with the tag in front, you can dip your head under the collar and contemplate your own mediumness.”
“Speaking of being medium,” I say, “I recently read that in experiments involving cockroaches and aggression, it turns out that aggressiveness is a quality most valuable in medium-sized cockroaches. Evidently, this is because they have the most to lose.”
“What can a cockroach possibly have to lose?” he asks.
At this, we conclude our conversation. Having achieved a difficult Zen koan, what is there left to say?
WEDNESDAY.
Howard calls up to see if I want to go out for seafood.
“One of my goals this year is to eat more lobster,” he says. “And wait until you see me in a lobster bib. It’s a very handsome, slimming look.Well worth your paying for dinner just to behold me in it.”
“When you were ten,” I ask, “did you ever think you’d one day be in your thirties hustling lobster?”
“If, at ten, I’d gone to a palm reader who told me I’d one day be living in a cardboard box, subsisting on gobstoppers, and able to watch The Twilight Zone five days a week on cable, I’d think the future was looking pretty good.”
“Can we blame our public school education for breeding in us such lowered expectations?” I ask. “Maybe we’d have made more of ourselves if we were home schooled.”
“Depends which home the schooling was taking place in,” he says. “In my home, our encyclopedias were used to prop up windows. My dad kept the whole set in a cardboard box in the garage beside his tool box.”
“How does fish and chips sound?” I ask.
“Pretty good,” he says.
Never underestimate the power of medium expectations.