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Urgent Business in the South
May. 24th, 2014 09:08 amMemorial Day was always a big weekend for the Little Store…
I’ve rather resolutely put the Little Store out of my mind for the past six years.
Not entirely sure why I started thinking about it this Memorial Day. Maybe it’s because I had dinner with Linda the other night, and as is the case with all new friends, I felt compelled to give her the elevator version of my biography –
“So over the course of one year, I lost my business, my husband deserted me and I moved 3,000 miles away from all my family and friends!” I gurgled cheerfully.
“Oh, my God!” said Linda. “That must have been tough!”
Was it tough?
I really can’t remember. Of course I kept copious notes during the process, but I never read back over my own journals. I find them too painful. They’re a chronicle of personal failure.
Of course, since my own contemporaries on the front lines are beginning to drop, what I notice these days is that success, failure, it really doesn’t matter one way or another. You drop; people forget you. Your precious belongings get divided up. Even the most powerful people make only the smallest counter-eddy against the relentless crash of the waves.
###
Given this weekend’s crushing potential for melancholy, I really should have been aggressive about lining up social encounters since social encounters are a reliable distraction. I’ve done so much socializing in the last 10 days, though, I figured I needed some time to regroup.
So instead, I’m sitting here watching The Man Who Would Be King --![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
saltdawg planted the movie in my head – which is kind of the penultimate sweeping narrative that, in the end, is utterly inconsequential. Rudyard Kipling, so imbued with the racism of his time, is an unfashionable writer these days but The Man Who Would Be King a brilliant novella: I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice... And he became King of Kafiristan. And that's all there is to tell. I'll be on my way now, sir. I have urgent business in the south.
I’ve rather resolutely put the Little Store out of my mind for the past six years.
Not entirely sure why I started thinking about it this Memorial Day. Maybe it’s because I had dinner with Linda the other night, and as is the case with all new friends, I felt compelled to give her the elevator version of my biography –
“So over the course of one year, I lost my business, my husband deserted me and I moved 3,000 miles away from all my family and friends!” I gurgled cheerfully.
“Oh, my God!” said Linda. “That must have been tough!”
Was it tough?
I really can’t remember. Of course I kept copious notes during the process, but I never read back over my own journals. I find them too painful. They’re a chronicle of personal failure.
Of course, since my own contemporaries on the front lines are beginning to drop, what I notice these days is that success, failure, it really doesn’t matter one way or another. You drop; people forget you. Your precious belongings get divided up. Even the most powerful people make only the smallest counter-eddy against the relentless crash of the waves.
Given this weekend’s crushing potential for melancholy, I really should have been aggressive about lining up social encounters since social encounters are a reliable distraction. I’ve done so much socializing in the last 10 days, though, I figured I needed some time to regroup.
So instead, I’m sitting here watching The Man Who Would Be King --
saltdawg planted the movie in my head – which is kind of the penultimate sweeping narrative that, in the end, is utterly inconsequential. Rudyard Kipling, so imbued with the racism of his time, is an unfashionable writer these days but The Man Who Would Be King a brilliant novella: I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice... And he became King of Kafiristan. And that's all there is to tell. I'll be on my way now, sir. I have urgent business in the south.
