In a MOOD

[mallorys_camera]

Ed and I went berry picking.

It was a gorgeous day. We had a merry old time driving up the back country roads into deepest, wildest Columbia County.

“See, here’s the thing,” Ed said. “Facts in most situations are irrelevant to me. I collect what I call smudges of information.”

I laughed and said, “Those are called stories, Ed!”

###

What I didn’t take into consideration is that when you pick 20 pounds of blueberries and strawberries, you actually have to do something with them. I was in a mood, you see.

I’ve been in a mood for centuries, it seems—though I’m sure if I wasn't so lazy, I could do the math, force myself to count backwards, and I’d find out that it’s only been a matter of a week at most. Picking those berries— communing with my hunter/gatherer forbearers—had been a pleasant respite, but it didn’t change the fact that the world is a hostile and alien place.

I made jam with the blueberries.






A billion years ago, I used to make a lot of jam.

That was back when I was a hippie.

###

When I first had Max, I was terrified. There were so many things I had to protect him from! Chief among those things was myself. Like one time I was crossing a busy intersection, pushing his baby carriage, and the light began to change. I retreated hastily to the curb, but I left the carriage in the crosswalk.

“Patrizia!” Barbara Angell cried. And she grabbed the carriage.

Things like that happened all the time. In order to protect Max, I decided, I had to start driving tanks. So I bought the first in a series of 1970s Mercedes Benz sedans. I could collide with a dozen Honda Civics, I figured, and they would be but scrap metal against my mighty grille.

Not that I knew anything about automobile engines, but it occurred to me that now that I had acquired a high-maintenance car with special needs, I probably needed to acquire an auto mechanic, too. I chose someone I already knew, Bob Howard.

Bob Howard had kinda, maybe, sorta, sometimes dated a pal of mine named Linda Goodwill. She’d been completely obsessed with him, and in the early morning coffee klatches in Eleanor and Linda’s kitchen on Benvenue Street I routinely participated in a decade or so before Max was born, Linda would discuss Bob Howard’s latest sexual machinations.

“So last night, he kept his clothes on. But he made me get naked. And then he made me sit in front of a mirror and told me to masturbate while he watched—“

“Ohhhhhhh!” we’d squeal.

Bob Howard never took Linda out. That’s because he had severe agoraphobia. He was capable of walking right up to the edge where his property line met the sidewalk, but he couldn’t take one step off it.

“What happens when you try?” I asked him once.

“I don’t try,” he said.

Even with the agoraphobia, I could understood the attraction. Bob Howard was handsome in a way I found appealing back then: long ponytail and scraggly facial foliage camouflaging the straight nose and rigid jaw line he’d inherited from five generations of New England ascetics. He was very intelligent, too. Had a way of making psychologically astute remarks that while illuminating, were not in the least compassionate. Once when I was complaining about how misunderstood I always felt, he just fixed me with his unforgiving eyes, and said, “We never feel quite so unloved as when we ourselves are most unloving.”

Those words have stayed with me.

Whenever I’m in a mood, I think, Your real problem is that you’re not capable of love.

###

The jam didn’t turn out too badly. It tastes really good, but it’s a little runny. I didn’t use quite enough pectin, I guess.