The Nice Lady with her Dog

I met my neighbour, the 50% man, on my way home from work the other day. If you wonder why I call him that, you can read about it by clicking here.

I was walking up along the street before mine and he was driving his white van. He stopped to talk to me and rolled down his window, but he didn’t pull in very far so the subsequent few minutes were spent trying to wave cars past him in both directions.

After a few impatient glares from passing drivers, I suggested he might pull in a little more and so he did and then we got to talking.

It turned out that he was quite upset. As a man who clearly values neighbourly contact and community interaction, he was distressed to find that one of our neighbours had very recently died and he had not learned of it until several days after the event when, as is the normal course of Irish bereavement, the funeral proceedings were all over and done with.

I asked who the lady was and he told me it was the nice lady with her dog, which she walks all the time. For my sins, I couldn’t place who he was talking about. This is very much a part of my make-up, my continuing and gradually increasing inability to make connections in my head between people and the places they inhabit.

He tried again to tell me who the recently deceased lady was but he used the common device of naming her neighbours and, in this attempt, he may as well have been using the Periodic Table of Elements to let me know who she was. We parted, both sad at the event we hadn’t been aware of, with me still painfully unaware of who I was sad about.

Two days later, I was walking up the same street and, sitting outside her house in the sun, was Donna. She was sitting on the low wall and grooming her lovely sheep dog with a textured glove. The dog got up from her grooming session and came over to me for her customary pet on her head. This is a long-held tradition we have, as I believe this to be the nicest dog in the entire neighbourhood. She is gentle and has a benign and pleasant disposition. I was a little touched that she would give up on a perfectly good groom just to enjoy a head-rub from me so I obliged gladly.

“She’s a bit out of sorts,” Donna said.

“Really?” I asked, “Why’s that?”

“She’s missing her Mum,” Donna replied and then she started to cry gently.

“She died,” she said.

I stopped rubbing the sad dog’s head.

“Your Mum? She died?”

Donna nodded. A few days before, quite suddenly. I gave her a hug. I couldn’t believe it. The nice lady with her dog had died and I didn’t even know it. And, possibly worse, The 50% Man had told me all about it and I couldn’t even guess who he was talking about.

And the funny thing was, it wasn’t because I hardly knew her that I couldn't guess who she was. Quite the opposite. It was because I knew her so very much better than that. My mind couldn't compute that if might be her who was gone. We spoke most days. The lovely dog was our common theme but the weather often featured too. She was lovely and her dog was lovely and I wished I’d known that she had passed away, so that I could have paid my respects, and I also wished that I had thought of her when I learned that somebody nice with a dog had died.

I looked her up on the website that records deaths in Ireland. She was originally from Peterborough in the UK. The condolence notes told me she was a keen darts player in the local pub and her team mates clearly thought very highly of her.

Her name was Sheila Dean.

I never knew her name, but I thought she was lovely and I’m very, very sad that she’s gone.

As we often say in Ireland around these times:

May her soul, and the souls of all the faithfully departed, through the mercy of God rest in peace.

K x

The Silent Plea of Claude Depussy

 

I haven’t posted any of my short fiction here in a long time. In case you’re interested, there is quite a lot of such stuff down in the dusty annals of this blog. There’s links to my stories on the right-hand side of the page you’re currently on. Some of them are even almost okay, I think.

This piece was written for an RTE Radio One Programme last year, but it wasn’t accepted. There was a word limit for the submissions, and a choice of themes were offered. I like to have restrictions like that sometimes; it seems to help me write.

The theme I chose was 'The Patron Saint of...'

 

The Silent Plea of Claude Depussy

Don levels a teaspoon of instant coffee then tips a little back into the jar. He adds water from the kettle and milk from the tiny plastic bottle. He pulls his chair close to the kitchen table and draws his tablet towards him. On the radio, the classics station is playing that Sarabande it often plays. He enjoys the music but resents how all the adverts are directed towards old people. He knows he is old himself.

Out on the window cill, Claude Depussy catches Don’s eye and mews silently. Don knows that the plaintiff appeal would be completely silent even if he was outside. Claude Depussy is not a vocal cat. His mew generally signals a demand for some breakfast. But Don is behind schedule, and he knows that Claude will have already scored his meal from one of the neighbours. Any offering from Don now would be sniffed at, rejected, and disdainfully left for the swifts to argue over.

The social media forum opens easily on the tablet after a few curt swipes. Don reluctantly quit the other one after you know who bought it. Some of his friends had followed him over to this new frontier but he missed connections and the reach he had cultivated in the old place.

He opens a new message and types, “Today is the feast day of…” and then he brings up the online encyclopedia and checks.

“Saint Nicholas Owen helped the persecuted Catholic priests of England find hiding places. Arrested a final time in 1606, Nicholas Owen was tortured and killed.”

Claude Depussy paws at the window. A little rain spatters the glass.

Don copies the text and pastes it into his message. He pares the words down to fit the character limit, adds an illustration showing the unfortunate saint in extremis, then hits send. The message consolidates itself somewhere on a faraway server and then appears on his screen as a formatted fully compiled fact for the entire world to appreciate. Don sips his coffee and waits for possible responses. Claude Depussy slips off the window cill to seek shelter from the rain.

Don was never a person to frequent churches but, on the occasions of the death of each of his parents, he was required to attend. At each of the two ceremonies, the elderly priest had spoken briefly about the deceased, using snippets he had hoovered up in the porch beforehand, and had then slipped into a rather lengthy account of the life of the saint whose feast day it was. The two saints that Don heard about in this way, Ultan of Ardbraccan and Martin of Tours, both presented interesting and challenging life stories. It wasn’t long after the second funeral that Don assumed the practice of posting daily online updates about the Saint of the Day.

He quickly discovered that there wasn’t just one saint for every day. There were many. The lesser of them clamoured for attention on all the minor saint-filled days. This allowed Don to provide a different saint for most days each year so that his readership would not grow jaded. The superstars like St Patrick and St Joseph were gifted days all to themselves.

The classic station on the radio is now playing something that could hardly be defined as classic at all. Don’s coffee has petrified, a milky film forming on the surface. He refreshes the display on his tablet and scans for replies. There are never any replies, not since that man bought the other place and Don quit it on principle. He wishes principles weren’t so costly. But that’s how it seems to be with the daily saints and also with him.

Don stands up and moves stiffly to the sink where he empties the remains of the coffee. The liquid adds something miniscule to the brown stain that is already established around the plug hole. Claude Depussy reappears startlingly at the window and performs a loud silent mew to Don, to the glass pane that separates them, and to the backdrop of misty rain.

Behind him, the tablet pings. He turns and moves back to the screen.

The message is from a woman who calls herself ‘Bess_on_Wheels_67’. Her profile picture shows a fully clothed person, which is, in itself, an encouraging sign. Her text reads.

“Your daily ‘Saint of the Day’ postings bring me comfort and pleasure. xx”

She follows rapidly with another message, “You are the Patron Saint of Patron Saints.”

Don bends and types out the words, “Thank you.” His little finger hovers over the return button that will transmit the message to ‘Bess_on_Wheels_67’ and to the world.

On the window cill, Claude Depussy raises a plaintiff front paw.

Don withdraws his finger and cancels the message. He moves around the kitchen, silencing first the radio, then the tablet, returning finally to the kitchen sink. He stretches over the taps to the window, works the handles, and pushes on the sash to open it a little.

Silently, elegantly, Claude Depussy eases in.

Haunted by Katz’s Pastrami on Rye

In case you’re already wondering where I’ll end up going with this, I’ll tell you. Save you a little stress. This will be a post about Instagram. So, now you know.

Onward.

I’ve never been to Katz’s Delicatessen in Manhattan. I’ve been to Manhattan (wow) but didn’t get to go to Katz's. But both my sons did. Even better, they went together. Sam was living in Brooklyn and John was visiting him. So off they went. I believe Sam went for the Pastrami and Rye and John had the Reuben. Katz’s is a very popular attraction in New York but it also pulls off the magic trick of apparently being beloved by many of the inhabitants of that city as well as the blow-ins. Many people know of it on account of the movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’ and particularly that scene where Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal have lunch together and Rob Reiner’s Mother says, “I’ll have what she’s having.” It’s quite a brag and lots of visitors probably go there for that reason alone. But, interestingly, Katz Deli doesn’t seem to trade on that at all. Not one little bit, as far as I can see. No. They trade on their food, and more specifically their sandwiches. That’s why my sons went there. They are both ‘foodies’ and they were both keen to experience the place, the food, and the sizable bill. They both enjoyed it and when they were home at Christmas, they told me about it and it sounded great and now I want to go there and try it and if I ever get back to New York again, I believe I will.

So there.

We come towards the point. Having heard some stuff about Kat’s Deli from my sons, I must have looked it up on the internet. Or maybe my phone just heard me mention it and did the rest. Whatever the reason, and the level of justified paranoia attached to it, my Instagram account sprung into action and showed me a little video of a person ordering their sandwich at the counter in the Deli. It went on to show the guy making the sandwich and that was very interesting to me so I watched it all.

Then another, quite similar video came up, then another, then another.

Now, some months later, if you provided me with the raw materials, I feel I could whip you up a Reuben with Cheese with relative ease. I am continually bombarded with videos of Katz’s people making their sandwiches. I have seen, literally, hundreds of them sail across my Insta feed.

I guess the simple fact is this: when the Insta algorithm figures out that you might like something, it shows you lots of that thing. Lots and lots of it.

And, in all fairness, the making of a Katz sandwich makes for a pretty compelling video. A huge chunk of cured meat is landed on the cutting board and the person making the sambo trims at least one third of the thing away in very few samurai-like sweeps of the blade. The cuttings are swept unceremoniously to the floor and the remaining chunkette is trimmed into slender slices with consummate skill and then piled extravagantly onto nice bread. A swipe of mustard, a huge gelatinous blob of melted cheese, if so desired, and up it comes.

Here are three things I learned from my Katz video watching, just in case you ever get there.

Leave a tip and you get a sample of the meat on a plate while your order is being magicked-up.

Go to the further counters for less queue length. (I don’t really know how this works in reality, but it does seem to be a thing.)

There is free drinking water on tap available somewhere in the back of the deli. This is the biggest secret I know.

Of course, Instagram doesn’t just show me videos of sandwiches being made. Other forced enthusiasms present themselves regularly, very few of them welcome. I am glad that the AI Cat stuff has now receded and hate that it has been replaced by copious bearded elderly men doing chair yoga. Swings and roundabouts.

The latest Insta Thing, for me at least, is people selecting and showing their favourite books. This is odd for a number of reasons. Mostly because the people making the videos don’t seem to generally care very much about the books and also the vast majority of them seem to select from the same tiny catchment pile of novels. ‘East of Eden’, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’, ‘Lonesome Dove’, ‘Crime and Punishment’, and ‘No Country for Old Men’ all keep on coming up and the people waving them around, after initially hiding the covers like they have some big secret to tell, don’t seem like people who have read these books at all. I kind of feel like I am missing something with these book recommendation videos but I don’t think it’s anything more than that these folk are trying to get hits and views and will use any device to get them, books being their current side hustle.

There are exceptions to every rule and there’s a young person called Rhia who turns up to discuss her favourite books and she is clearly passionate and clearly knows what she is talking about. Her books are riddled with little coloured bookmarks and she always seems honest about what she likes and doesn’t like. Rhia is the acceptable face of Instagram book reviews and no higher praise can I give.

Instagram is a good corner of social media, in my opinion at least. I see lots of friends there and love checking out the photos they share. But the ‘forced stuff’ is a bit too much sometimes. I makes me scared to glance at a particular ‘thing’ for fear that a plethora of clone ‘things’ will follow me around for the next six weeks.  

Fourth world problems… where would we be without them?