Ogden Frost

      Tonight proved a strange evening.   Off to one of my haunts, I wound up having (perhaps having is not the best word) helping an elderly, and largely incoherent, man in a wheelchair find his way home, which stirs my social anger because obviously this gent hadn't gone out by himself but had been abandoned by someone with the compassion of a Bushie.   Then, later, on a quiet night over a triplet of pints, I found myself-- always the last to notice such things-- half-flirting with a young woman I'd never met before, and with whom I barely exchanged a dozen words.   Call me a fool if you will (and most of you iin the peanut gallery probably will), but I've always been a sucker for subtle flirtation and for that which can be suggested with a little eye-action. I'm a guy who likes the smoulder before the combustion, the parrying before the clashing.   But she had such magnetic eyes, which, as most of you probably know, is the Doctor's Kryptonite. Even too if I remember the lines of Paul Simon:

She looked me over
And I guess she thought
I was all right
All right in a sort of a limited way
For an off-night

-- "I Know What I Know," from Graceland

The odd thing is this, because the Doc half-flirting is nothing new: for some reason I do not understand, a chill sometimes runs down my spine when I meet a young woman, and it usually means that she will, relationally or otherwise, prove relevant to me in some way or another. I had that feeling, that specific chill, tonight.   I do not know why, nor do I know what may yet come; sometimes those chills are of personal relevance rather than romantic or physical. This (instinct?) has never proven wrong yet, so now I'm wondering.   Something in my bones says there's something ultimately amiss about this, but (alas) I'm also a veteran-- a master?-- of amiss relationships. But for some reason I'm possessed of a sense of Tiresian foreboding. One haws to wonder at what fate may be initiating, cruelly.   Another warning to Caesar?   ForSooth, forsooth.

      As I have been writing this, Jenny adopts my side and my lap, so glad to have Daddy home. Jenny is loud, sometimes obnoxious, and nominated to eat anyone out of house and home; Jenny is also given to a devotion that is so sweetly remarkable because of its rarity, by which it means what it means, without caveats or conditions. There's beauty in that, a limpidity somewhere between Ogden Nash and Robert Frost.