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Written During Free Fall Friday
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Prompt- please please please be quiet
“I wish,” said Jimmy the nerd, “that our textbooks would have repetition, because then I would do better on the test.” We were in the school library, keeping our voices low.
I shot him a sharp glance—everybody knew Jimmy got the best marks. I said, “Ya, well, what’s better than good?” (Good marks)
You don’t have to be nerd to enjoy grammar, but it helps. Jimmy said, “Good, gooder, goodest.”
Elmer was just passing by—he’s as dumb as certain cartoon character, you know the one I mean, and throughout his life we had all let him know it. “Jimmy that’s great. How about ‘great, greater, greatest?’ No, that’s not funny at all.” Elmer was honest about himself and his humour. He had an older brother to try out his humour on. Believe me, poor Elmer needed to test stuff in advance.
“I sat on my dentures,” he said, pulling out some big false teeth, “and they bit me!”
“Wow,” said Jimmy, “check out those bicuspids.”
By this time the Lum twins at the next table had seen. I called over, “They’re Elmer’s dentures. They bit him in ass! In his pocket!”
The librarian noticed. Straight out of Central Casting, Ms Lang had a brown dress, spectacles on a chain, and—wait for it—hair up in a bun. And she was only twenty or something, in her first year of work. “Quiet!” She said.
Jimmy said, “Ya Sean, be quiet.”
Elmer said, “Ya Sean, be quiet.”
The Lum twins giggled. “Ya Sean, be quiet.”
“Quiet!” Was all Ms Lang said.
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Prompt- the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation,
so said Henry David Thoreau back in the 1800’s. His quote has lasted down the years, so, obviously, he really said a mouthful. I can just picture it: my neighbours, during their quiet teatime of the soul, in the dead of night, or by day if they ever stop rushing, suddenly feeling a desperate sense of, “why aren’t I? Why can’t I… keep up to the Joneses, who never seem desperate at all…”
Henry makes good sense, sometimes, but other times not so much. I mean, in Henry’s day, nobody walked around carrying little black boxes and tablets and ducked into an Internet cafe. Nobody lived for the dopamine rush of outrage from social media. To this very day the web is more likely to have a laugh out loud cat, or a career canceling troll, than to ever have a serene poem in gentle pentameter. I guess if we slowed down to read a poem about roses we might tap in to our terrible desperation—say, do young and idealistic students still talk about feeling angst? I’m sure they do, but not the mass of we non-students.
I can remember when a transit bus, full, would have at most a single person reading. Now the bus is full of people on their devices bustling on their screens to find a bee in the hedgerow. I can remember when walking to the bus, and riding the bus, was like relaxing with a cup of steaming English tea, a chance to lean back and allow noble thoughts to pop in. —Oh, and the odd ignoble thought that made me go, “ouch!” I am saying that I never minded what would seem to an outside observer like I was having a dull moment.
Now, if the mass of men can say, “Never a dull moment” then it is not because they are doing something exciting and momentous. No, they are merely filling a gap in the flatline of their lives. What’s it all about, Alfie? Having a little black box is like leading a life of cliches: Popular culture and trolls rushing in where an original thought never feels welcome to tread. I think I’d rather have the desperation.
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Prompt- travel advisory
Travel advisories on the country roads of the great plains are something to write home about. Never mind those lazy, hazy days of summer. Travel here can mean a sunny day with an outpouring of rain, followed by more brilliant sunshine, followed by hail of the biting horrible kind. I once walked knee deep in fog from rain hitting hot asphalt. Some one else wrote a book—later a George Peppard movie, with killer cockroaches—about the weather getting even worse, if such a thing is possible, after an atomic war, called Damnation Alley. The only reason the heroes cross the alley of the Great Plains is to get some medicine across the continent.
Some days I look to the skies and crank my survival radio to hear if there is any fallout. If not, I let the children go out and play. It helps to have a car with good filters and a solar power roof rack. Rarely do you hear an advisory about roaming bandits, not when people are quick to angrily form posses to take them down.
In a parallel world I took a marvellous jet jumbo, with three rows of three seats, but no movie screen. Why not? Because each seat back had it’s own wee screen. I do believe the movies were free if you had head phones. A boy rushed to get some, rejoined the passenger line up only to say that he had lost his airplane ticket in his rush. I said, “Maybe you put it in some really stupid pocket” but no, he tried every stupid place on his person. There must be a policy for that. The line up was in the prestigious Heathrow Airport, in a location chosen by a Canadian, working in Britain, who didn’t want to commute too far to the port. Today it connects, unlike Gatwick air port, all the way to London on the subway tube railway. Not many people traveled by plane back in those days, obviously, because the line up was far down a hallway, the waiting room was small, and too hot and stuffy for the amount of people. Of course, today’s planes are bigger, I was taking the Dreamliner, three rows of three seats. I don’t suppose any other planes are any bigger.
Someday I shall be old and jaded, but for now I love hotels, and I love flying. You get a deeper sleep than back in your own bed, and anyways, for my return, I stayed up the whole time writing essays on my laptop, about London.
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Sean Crawford
Above ground on a prairie in the British Commonwealth,
Where we say “indigenous” because “aborigine” means Australia,
November,
2022
Blog note: Free Fall Fridays, complete with prompts, are both in real space and on-line. My choice: Being part postman, (Like them, I wore black reebok walking shoes for years) I will fight through subzero snow to get to the in-person meeting.
