My Redacted Life: Chapter 29

We had enjoyed a trip to St. Louis, Brenda and I, and we had delivered the drawing of the proposed development to the firm there without incident. The development never happened, though. Unfortunately, it proposed a small element of affordable housing and the St. Louis County suburb for which it was proposed didn’t hold affordable housing in high esteem. There were slums in “The City” for that purpose.

But I had done my job. It was nearly noon Friday before we had returned, I had swapped cars, and had debriefed Tom and Jack on my visit with the clients. I say “clients,” despite the fact that our work on this project was another “on the come” deal. I found, as time went by, that doing free work was an extremely easy thing to do in the consulting business, perhaps the greatest single cause of bankruptcy. The danger was that it could make one feel like a master salesperson, but going broke while selling air for free.

Real results, I would decide later, required commitments, in many areas of life. Right now, I was thinking of other things.

We had stopped, Brenda and I, in southern Missouri, at a roadside market. There, we had purchased an entire bushel of peas, probably trucked in from Texas but we didn’t care. Friday evening, after unpacking and enjoying a burgers and fries from Burger Chef, we sat on my patio and shelled peas like an old farm couple.

What? Oh dear. We were drifting out of the 1970s, back past the 1960s, into an age I thought would never exist again, at least for me. I took a sip of red wine and felt the delicious sharp taste caress my tongue. Life was good, after all.

The river was particularly beautiful that evening, the moonlight bouncing off remnants of large cumulus clouds and creating a sensual glimmer. I looked over at Brenda, shelling peas and smiling as if life had designed her for this moment. The sound of peas hitting a bowl mixed with a soft summer breeze, blowing in just a faint smell of honeysuckle from somewhere. From far away, a siren sounded, reminding one that the city was still alive. Magic? You decide.

Just before dark, my neighbor heard us and came around the partition to say hello. I gawked, and Brenda said, “Didn’t you forget something?” My neighbor looked, gasped, darted back around the partition. We didn’t see her again that evening.

The next day, we took some shelled peas to her grandmother, who lived a small distance from her parents. I made another friend for life. They piled up these days, without much effort.

We had enjoyed ourselves lately. I mostly behaved, mostly I say. I suffered from occasional “weak moment flashbacks,” the product of being a child of the 1960s, a veteran of four years of minimal adult supervision, and a plethora of character flaws. She cured these with a sharp rebuke and the stomping of a tiny foot. In this respect, she was like my Sainted Mother, a woman of slight stature and delicate features but bolstered by a strength like tensioned steel.

In short, we became accustomed to one another. I learned that she possessed the inscrutability of an oriental Zen master, and she learned that I was malleable, if neither perfect nor predictable.

I suppose it might have gone on like this for some time had I not taken her for ride just before sundown that Sunday evening.

What was I supposed to do?