Waiting on a Friend

This is a fella waiting on a friend.  CC.  He is going to be traveling with his wife for the next two months.  I thought about that.  I've never traveled for more than six weeks at a time.  Two months.  It will be strange to come home.  Still. . . home is home.  

The fellow in photo, once a constant traveller, hasn't traveled anywhere in years.  People tell him he should go somewhere, he says.  All the time.  He wonders.  He is tired, he says, and just wants to sleep (perchance to dream?).  Ay.  What can one look forward to after it's all been done?  

A good burger, perhaps.  CC treated me to lunch.  He said it was his turn, but I don't remember.  I let him because he is making $cha-ching$ working in theater.  Now he is taking all his hard earned cash and turning it into experiences.  It will be a slow moving agenda, he says.  They will travel leisurely.  

Maybe there are lessons to be learned. 

Ah. . . but a burger and onion rings and a good IPA.  It is like traveling to distant places.  How many years since onion rings?  How often a burger with bleu cheese?  

"Would you like water?"

"Do we look like the kind of fellows who drink water?  People who drink water look healthy, handsome."

[Laughter]

I decide to buy tulips for the table.  How long since tulips?  They remind me of love. 

"You need to go somewhere.  Get out of the house."

"I have invitations."

"You should go."

Old CC will make a go of it.  

"I don't know.  Maybe in October."  

Velleity.  That's a good word.  

“It was another country. . . and besides, the whore is dead."

But my memory was faulty.

Thou hast committed—
Fornication: but that was in another country,
And besides, the wench is dead.
               The Jew of Malta

"Hamlet."  "The Jew of Malta."  "Portrait of a Lady."  

Oh how I write of burgers, beers, and tulips.  

I think I may have caught something.