What Time Is It?

Read Time: 4 minutes

WHAT! 2021, ALREADY?

Swept up in the mad whirl of life, I did not see this coming.

It was Milo Bung who informed me. 

He stood on my front stoop in casual clothes and formal mask. Even Milo has learned to mask up. He shivered in the pool of arctic air we have lately inherited from the Canadians. “Well? You just going to stand there and let me freeze to death?” 

“Oops, sorry.” I opened the door and let him slip inside. 

He stamped his feet and adjusted his mask. That is to say, he took it off. He’s been in a bubble for months and so have I. We’re both of an age where we’ll be next in line for the vaccine.

“What’s got into you?” Milo demanded. “Did you actually not know last night was New Year’s Eve?”

“I slept through it, like most other things. To tell you the truth, I was preparing to suck the remaining joy out of 2020, but now you tell me the chance is gone.”

“Wake up and smell the coffee, pardner.” That was a hint.

François Villon. Public Domain.

“Come on, I’ll make some.” I led him into the kitchen and sat him down. “The years go by too fast. Où, I ask you,  sont les neiges d’antan?” This was a bit of Gallic ju-jitsu, intended to trap him into a long-winded discussion of an irrelevant subject. 

Dear Reader, perhaps I’ve neglected to mention that after his unfortunate stint in the Marine Corps, Milo picked up a master’s degree in French Medieval Literature. So he would know I merely meant to ask, “Where are the snows of yesteryear?” But he would not be able to resist a mini-lecture on François Villon. That was my theory, you see.

Milo surprised me. “? I’ll tell you . They’ve been piling up around our ankles and knees for years. Now we’re up to our ribcages in them, and I can tell you, they’re going for the throat.” I had never seen such intensity from my old school chum. But I shared his concern.

Let me explain, Dear Reader, in case you, through no fault of your own, are among the metaphor-impaired. My old friend the French scholar was referring to years. The separate snowfalls are just harbingers of time. And indeed the years do pile up around one, just as successive snows will eventually swamp the hardiest mountain cabin.

Cabin in Snow. Photo by Ricardo Gomez Angel on Unsplash.

I poured coffee and set it before him. “What do you propose we do about them, Milo—all these neiges?”

He took a sip, made a grateful face, and gave me a canny look. His eyes measured me, from the top of my snowy head to the gnarled hand resting on the curved handle of a cane, and on down to its rubber tip, planted on the linoleum near my questionable legs.

“You’ll be all right,” he said. “You’ve got baggage to throw overboard yet. Go up to the hospital in a couple of weeks, get that hip replaced, and by spring you’ll be good for another fifty thousand miles.”

I smiled. “It’s wonderful what they can do now, isn’t it?”

He frowned. “Me, I got nothing like that left to improve. I’ll just have to get by on sheer force of personality.”

“Gee, Milo, what if you run out?”

He scowled. “I’ll make up something else, you slippered old pantaloon.” 

I stared at him through the spectacles on the end of my nose. He had assured me of fifty thousand more miles, but from where I tottered, fifty thousand didn’t seem like all that many. 

Nonetheless, when he took his homeward way, I was cheered. After all, I had received encouragement from no less than Milo Bung, direct lineal descendant of Aethelred the Unready, and third cousin to Slats Grobnik.

Happy snowfalls to you all.

Larry F. Sommers,

Your new favorite writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Faster Than a Lobster Quadrille

The young man peered at me over his designer mask. “Do you have a cell phone?”

“No.”

He stared. His brow wrinkled. “Uh . . . wait here.” He ducked back inside. 

There was a sign on the door that warned: 

“NO ENTRY. Call On Cell Phone.

Staff Will Meet You In Parking Lot.”

You’d think they were dealing crystal meth.

(In the interest of full disclosure, Gentle Reader: I do have a cell phone. 

(But I don’t use it. 

Photo by Meghan Schiereck on Unsplash.

(It’s an old clamshell on a $13-a-month plan. It lives in my car, awaiting that moment when I may drive into a snow bank and need help getting out. But who, in the meantime, needs to know of its existence?)

The door opened and the young man re-emerged. “They’ll be with you in a minute.” 

He edged by me and darted down the walk to where a better-trained customer stood, cell phone in hand, hoisting with the other hand a small cage which held a lop-eared rabbit.

Did I feel no guilt, you ask, gumming up the procedures of a nice veterinary clinic?

GUILT? Ha! You may as well ask a wolverine about origami.

Turns out, once they discover one’s masked presence standing at their door—even without a cell phone call—they will eventually bring out the allergy pills one pre-ordered for one’s itchy American Staffordshire terrier mix. 

In the present COVID-19 public health emergency, who could have predicted the emergence of common sense?

#

Milo Bung shook his head when I told him the story. “You go to a lot of trouble to avoid using your cell phone.”

“It’s no trouble at all.”

My old classmate glared like a bright young assistant district attorney cross-examining a defendant. “What have you got against cell phones?” 

“What has a cell phone ever done for me?”

Milo scratched his head. “How would I know?”

“Exactly.”

A new idea lit up his face. “What if you want to take a picture?”

“I would use my Nikon. But I’ve already made enough photographs for one lifetime.”

“Is that a fact,” said Milo. He looked askance. “You’ve given up photography altogether?”

“I remember the best moments of all my vacations. The images stored in my brain are better than mere photos. They have more je ne sais quoi.”

In any case, I thought but did not say, when my brain loses the memories, the pictures won’t help either.

Milo rapped his knuckles on the bar. “You’re a hard case, amigo.”

“Besides,” I astutely pointed out, “I like to deal with people in the flesh.”

“Isn’t that sort of old school?”

“That’s me all over.”

#

I was not always thus. It takes decades of study to become an old crank.

Gradually, if you’re a sentient being, you apprehend that in today’s world, the sense of community that underpins mental health has been eroded. In this desert of commonality and fellow-feeling, any face-to-face, or mask-to-mask, encounter, even with a stranger, can be salutary.

#

Years ago, a fellow yahoo on a Road Scholar trip—a man named Larry, by sheer coincidence—tried to browbeat me into needing a GPS navigating device.

“What!” he exclaimed. “You don’t have a *INSERT BRAND NAME HERE*? How can you not have one? You can get one for under a hundred dollars.” 

“Or I could not get one,” I pointed out, “and keep my hundred dollars.” 

“No, seriously. You can’t afford to be without it.”

“So far, I’m doing fine.”

“But it’s so cheap, you’ve got to have one.”

I could have explained that 99 percent of my trips are to places I know how to get to; that I can, and do, look up the other one percent in advance; and that if, despite that preparation, I should get lost, I can always stop and ask someone. But no logic would have convinced Larry that my lack of a *INSERT BRAND NAME HERE* was okay.

His real problem was that my zoom lens was longer than his. Given that circumstance, his only play was to beat me over the head with his GPS device.

#

I am no Luddite, I tell myself, but simply a man who values the personal touch. 

Why should I ring up my own merchandise at Home Depot when a real pro is on duty one lane over? A person who, by the way, would like to keep her job. 

Sure, I could knuckle under to the ruling paradigm, but I would feel like I was abandoning The Little Guy. If I have to stand in line a few extra minutes, so what? Where else do I have to be?

Our pet spa has the same “call up on the cell phone” routine that the vet’s office does. But rather than lose an eighty-dollar grooming job, they’ll eventually notice me and my shaggy spaniel as we wait in the parking lot.

Some inchoate power out there always wants me to do things in a new way. But, Lord help me, I like the old way. 

They want me to vote early this year—either by mailing in my ballot or by handing it to a designated early-ballot collector sitting under a sign in a public park. All well and good.

But, why? 

Is the election going somewhere? Will the polls be closed?

No. 

My plan is to show up, masked, on election day, at the polling place where I am registered, holding my photographic ID in hand. I trust they’ll let me vote—even though they won’t be able to see that my face matches the photo on the ID—and they’ll count my vote. 

So what’s the problem?

#

Tout le monde, Dear Reader, is NOT rushing off to some Brave New World so fast an old geezer can’t keep up—impressions to the contrary notwithstanding.

You might mention that to Milo Bung when you see him.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Writer

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)

Milo Bung: Fact or Fiction

There is a niche of special distinction in the Class Clowns’ Hall of Fame, and it contains a marble bust of Milo Bung, smiling beatifically and crowned with laurel. When we were in sixth grade Milo was a source of much innocent merriment.

Laurel-crowned Milo Bung. Or perhaps, Apollo? Photo © Marie-Lan Nguyen / Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY 2.5

Where your average class clown fed on spectacles like putting a thumb tack on the teacher’s chair while she was down the hall grabbing a smoke, or stacking books on a desk corner so they would fall when somebody walked by, Milo was more subtle. 

His specialty was a unique glassy-eyed stare, which he flashed whenever the teacher called on him for an answer. I don’t know whether he was transfixed by the mystery of South America’s principal exports, or just languid by nature. 

Whatever Milo had, subtlety was of its essence.

Masking 

I bumped into him at the supermarket recently, pushing his cart the wrong way up a COVID-directed aisle. “Milo,” I said, “where’s your mask?” 

“Mask?” he wondered.

“Like the one I’m wearing. You know, for coronavirus.”

“Oh, is that why everybody’s wearing masks?”

I nodded, as emphatically as one can nod at Milo Bung. “Without a mask, you might get sick and die.”

His eyes opened wide. “Then I’d better stock up right now on Cheetos.” And off he dashed, up the down aisle.

Looting

That was my most recent encounter with Milo until now; but apparently he has not gotten sick and died yet, for I saw him tonight on the ten o’clock news. A squad car lay burning in the street. Several demonstrators, or maybe outside agitators, stepped through the smashed front window of a store that sells ladies’ foundation garments. They carried boxes and cartons of what must have been frilly unmentionables. 

Despite the burning squad car, no cops were in view; yet here came Milo, strolling down the street, right into camera range. He halted smack dab in the center of all this resistance to injustice. He swiveled his head this way and that, then stared into the camera with an expression that proclaimed, “Is anybody else seeing what I’m seeing?” He shrugged and ambled out the right side of the frame. He had something in his hands. Looked like a bag of Cheetos. 

Knowing they must have taped this earlier in the evening, I surmised that Milo Bung, if not in jail, might now be at home. So I dialed his number. Sure enough, he answered.

“I saw you on TV! In the middle of a riot!” I shouted as calmly as I could.

“A riot?” said Milo. “(Crunch, crunch.) Oh, sure, that’s what it must have been.”

“Couldn’t you tell?”

“Well, something funny was going on, that’s for sure. It’s getting so a guy can’t take an evening promenade (crunch, crunch) without running into out-of-towners.” 

“Out-of-towners!” I roared. “How do you know they were out-of-towners?”

“Well, (crunch, crunch), stands to reason. I mean, how many guys do you know from around here (crunch, crunch) that need so many boxes of lacy underwear for their sweeties?”

“Are you munching Cheetos?”

“Yeah, I got boxes and boxes of them. Come on over, I’ll give you some.”

“But weren’t you even aware what they were rioting about? It was injustice. Racial injustice. What do you think about that?”

There was a moment’s silence on the line while Milo digested my question, and his Cheetos. “One man’s injustice,” he said, “is another man’s free underwear.”

“Is that all you’ve got to say?”

“No, but if I told you, then you’d blab it to everybody else, so I’m clamming up.”

Uniformed Service

Milo was always a step or two ahead of the rest of us. He was the first boy in our class to declare what he wanted to be when he grew up: An elevator operator. “I like the look of a uniform,” he drawled. When we graduated from high school—and, lo! all elevators had been converted to self-service—Milo joined the Marines. 

Imagine my confusion when Ho Chi Minh let Milo live and returned him to our community in his original condition. He may simply have been unshootable. Wouldn’t surprise me one bit.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers, Your New Favorite Author

Author of Price of Passage—A Tale of Immigration and Liberation.

Price of Passage

Norwegian Farmers and Fugitive Slaves in Pre-Civil War Illinois

(History is not what you thought!)