August Story...part 1

August Story...part 1

Attempting to do a NaNoWriMo thing in August...not an official thing mind you, but following that pattern. November just doesn't work if you work in the grocery business. Trying to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Got about 900 words in Friday...got another 2000 in this morning. So, I'm a little behind. But I have a few mornings off this week. So I got that going for me.

Anyway...here's a taste. Surprised at how out of shape I am, here. Not all that I've written. Just a taste.

A Word on Small Town Synchronicity

I’d managed to learn a new word, the other day, in the midst of an argument with the neighbors across the way. The word was Ennui, and I thought it was a hell of a phrase to hurl at a man recovering from a night of overindulgence.
The Maynards were selling their house, and they were worried my yardkeeping skills (or lack of initiative regarding) were hurting their re-sale value.

“Who the hell wants to hear a lawnmower on Sunday morning anyway?” I answered in retort. With the grass tickling the back of my calves, just under my knee, I mustered up the reserve to say: “My grass ain’t bothering you folks. Get your realtor to come mow it if it’s an issue.”

This was a singularly bad choice of words, considering the Maynards had taken the services of Sherry DeHaven, perhaps our little town’s biggest celebrity, subject of pieces on both the Today Show and Oprah Winfrey. Figuring it’d be a little difficult to start and operate a pushmower in a mechanized wheelchair steered with what little movement she could muster from her left hand, I considered that I’d just destroyed my own war effort that hot Sunday morning with a shell from my own cannon.

After a stunned beat on both our parts, I conceded defeat, and told the Maynards, who’d wandered out in their church clothes to berate me, that I’d get the yard mowed later that day, as soon as I’d had time to wake up and get some gas in the mower.

David Maynard thanked me for my prompt attention. I turned to go inside, soak my wounds and look up just what the hell Ennui meant, to find out why I and my neighbors needed to find wherewithal enough to break my small-town’s Pabst Blue Ribbon fueled version of it to mow my yard. I made it maybe three purposeful steps back toward the homestead when I caught my foot on the metal bar connecting the head and motor of my weedeater, itself a subject of a little lawn’s vengeance, and went sprawling headlong into my yard.

I hit my head on the birdbath that my Uncle John had put up, once upon a time. Hit my head on the base, knocked the basin off, and had it crash to the ground, mere inches from my face. The basin, which held no water due to this summer’s bugger of a drought, and had served no useful purpose besides an occasional bed for my cat Roscoe, shattered. And despite it’s lack of function, I still cussed its demise.

I stood, holding my head, and saw both Maynards looking completely gobsmacked on their lawns, David in his grey and white suit, Sylvia in her blue dress with the sunflowers on it, mouths agape at the stream of obscenities I’d just unleashed upon a lawn decoration.

I looked from them, down at the shattered remains of the birdbath.

“And you’re ruining the Maynards’ property value, too!”

With that, I strutted up to the house.

After pulling a bag of frozen peas out of the freezer to put on the quickly rising pump knot on my forehead, I pulled the big, heavy, bug crushing dictionary from the shelf, and looked up the word that I’d figured was something of an insult from the Maynards….

Ennui: from the French, it referred to a weary and dissatisfied sense of boredom.

I leaned back, frozen Food Land peas on my forehead, and considered the ramifications of the accusation.

I considered that there was a grain of truth to what the Maynards had said. Since taking over Uncle John’s property down at the mouth of Woolly Holler, I hadn’t had need to accomplish much, but had derived very little sense of satisfaction along those lines. The thought that Maynards had been right was only a source of sharper irritation. Like the sandpaper had managed to remove the first layer of skin, and they’d moved to iodine.

That day, I managed to find the gas can, wander to the Shell station up the street to buy gas, and I’d mowed the yard.

During the mow, I managed to find three empty 40 oz. Beer bottles…somebody tossing their empty before they got home, I reckoned, probably throwing in a few pieces of strong mint gum, to hide the smell so the wife wouldn’t find them drinking cheap beer on their drive home.

I also found my 2 lb hammer (only a little rusted), the remote control to my satellite dish, that I’d had to order a new one for, the paperback novel I’d hurled into the yard after a particularly far-fetched bit of writing got my dander up, and seven golf balls, on the far end of the yard. Most of these were found with the blades of the mower, and hurled in new directions and fantastic distances never achieved off my driver. The sixth of these shot across the road into a tree across the way, into the Maynards’ yard. I did not put that particular math problem together until I saw David later that day, with a birdhouse resting on the fence, trying to pry a golf ball (presumably with a divot taken from its shell via my mower) out of the hole of the See Rock City birdhouse Sylvia’d had hanging from that particular tree.

Anyway, my point here was this….I learned a new word.
And thereafter, for a couple of days, I couldn’t read a news story, paperback mystery or breakfast menu at the gulp n’ go without finding the word Ennui.

In cases like that, I never know if the words have always been there, or not. I assume they had been, and in my day-to-day rush of everyday life, I’d glossed over, using context instead of actual wherewithal to find the meaning of the word.

I suppose it’d be the acme of self-centeredness to think that the word had only started popping up because I learned it.

But what if everybody else had learned it around the same time, and starting using it too?

That was a conversation to be had over a few beers, I believed, the next night I wandered out to tip a couple back.