PINE NUTS – Relationship Rekindled
August 29, 2023 | McAvoy Lane
In this unsettling world we live in, it feels good to have a relationship from a more predictable time, rekindled. That happened for me this summer when my high school sweetheart came to visit with two of her lady friends, and I got to sleep on a futon on the floor for a couple nights. Was there lively conversation? I sat in quiet awe, smiling, and oftentimes laughing out loud. It was nonstop entertainment at its finest.
But this time she might be coming back to visit alone, and I am frozen in fear, for my cooking has been known to leave people confused and disoriented for days. Then there is my daily Happy Hour with my pet jay, Huckleberry, during which time we talk and whistle and chortle back and forth for the longest time, while she will not understand a word we’re saying.
I’m reading Cervantes’s, Don Quixote de la Mancha, but don’t know how she will feel about my reading it out loud in its original Spanish. (I speak Spanish but don’t understand it.)
There is a good chance that she will start to cry while I’m reading this touching novel from 1605 out loud, as by her own admission, her tear ducts are connected somehow to her urinary tract, and she would shed copious and bountiful tears were I to accidentally step on a caterpillar.
Then there is the delicate matter of the bathroom, where I hang up my workout clothes in a maze that will require careful navigation on her part to locate the sink. I have been known to get lost in there myself during the night.
Driving in the car could be a challenge. I remember her chastising me while I was driving my ’55 Chevy in high school, “You’re awfully quiet today.”
“Quiet? Why would you say that?”
She smiled that sweet smile of hers and admonished, “‘Turn green, dammit, turn green!’ does not count as talk.” She was always good at correcting me like that.
I suppose I shall have to stop slurping water out of the tap, and drinking beer out of a bottle, then burping loud enough to wake General Grant and his wife in their tomb in New York. And I will definitely have to refrain from waking her in the morning by tickling her bare foot with an ostrich feather duster, because when I did that earlier this summer, she let out a squeal that could be heard in Albuquerque, told me I was immature, and would not talk to me for an hour.
Well, I shouldn’t get up-tight about how I’m supposed to act, because her relaxing presence will divine a path of behavior strewn with rose pedals, and I will naturally fall into a gallant mode of behavior that will warm her heart, and swell that forgiving heart of hers with pride that she could tame such a knight-errant as Don Quixote de la McAvoy.
Wish me luck, and keep your fingers crossed, unless you go bowling…