Читать книгу The Do-Over - Kathleen Ossip - Страница 13

Tool Moan

I sat at a table outside an Irish pub, with a child I adored and a man I didn’t, in a resort town in summer.

Another man sat on a folding chair attempting to entertain the diners with accordion music. At first I wondered if he was a street person, so shabby was he. I heard the waitresses call him Tool Moan.

How delicious, I thought. The accordion equals the tool, the music equals the moan? Above, on the plaza,

a band (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums) played, loudly, a funk version of Jimi Hendrix’s “Voodoo Child.” I wished I could hear the accordion music above the noise

but I couldn’t. Before we left home,

my mother had asked, as dinner conversation, “Are we moving through time or is time moving around us?” “I think we’re moving through time, Mom”—I was full of my own agency.

Actually time falls on us like a fine rain, almost unnoticed, soaking us to the bone.

Accordion music is the saddest music on earth: agree or disagree? I disagree.

Accordion music is delicate, like the feathers of snow on the mountains that surrounded the town.

The man paid the bill. The child ran ahead. Delicate equals subject to damage (and almost equals Celtic). “You have some competition tonight,” I said to Tool Moan as we left.

“I know,” he said. Later, back in the hotel room, I realized I’d misheard. His name was Tout le Monde (equals everybody in French). . . .