Driving Blind

We stood there for a long moment, like the pilgrims at Lourdes waiting for the daily miracle. If it happened, I was not aware. But Harry Hinds was. He pointed with his nose and eyebrows up, up along that huge tree and said, “See anything up there?”

I looked and shook my head. “Nope.”

“You sure?” said Harry.

I looked again and shook my head.

“The highest branch on the tree?” said Harry.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Funny.” Harry Hinds snorted faintly. “How come I see it clearly?”

I did not ask what it was he was seeing.

I looked up at the bare tree in the middle of an arboretum in the center of the lobby of the? Harold Hinds Foresight Corporation.

Did I expect to see the phantom outlines of a pair of pants way up there on the highest branch?

I did.

But there was nothing there. Only a high branch and no clothing.

Harry Hinds watched me looking at the tree and read my thought.

“Thanks,” he said, quietly.

“What?” I said.

“Thanks to you, to all of you, for what you did,” he said.

“What’d we do?” I lied.

“You know,” he said, quietly. “And thanks. Come on.”

And before I could protest, he led the way to the men’s and raised his brows, nodding, did I need to go? I did.

Standing at the porcelains, unzipped, Harry looked down as he watered the daisies.

“You know,

” he smiled, “there isn’t a day in my life, when I do this, that I don’t remember that day forty years ago and me up the tree and you down below and me peeing on all of you. Not a day passes I don’t remember. You, them, and peeing.”

Standing there, I froze and did nothing.

Harry finished, zipped up, and stood remembering.

“Happiest day of my life,” he said.

A Woman is a Fast Moving Picnic

The subject was women, by the singles and in the mobs.

The place was Heeber Finn’s not-always-open but always-talking pub in the town of Kilcock, if you’ll forgive the implication, in the county of Kildare, out along the River Liffey somewhat north and certainly beyond the reach of Dublin.

And in the pub, if only half full of men but bursting with talk, the subject was indeed women. They had exhausted all other subjects, hounds, horses, foxes, beers as against the hard stuff, lunatic mother-in-laws out of the bin and into your lives, and now the chat had arrived back to women in the pure state: unavailable. Or if available, fully dressed.

Each man echoed the other and the next agreed with the first.