Please Keep Priorities Front of Mind.

 

The name on the box of Peterborough Chocolates didn't ring any bells with me. Still though, I felt it was important to get my coat from the other room. I usually don't mind engaging in the flattery which comes with the territory, but tonight—of all nights!—I was sure if I looked long and hard enough, I'd find just the multicolored wad I'd had my eyes on from the very beginning. It was soon plain as day that this was not to be. The truss started to itch and my goniff became fully inflamed. This is usually the part of the story where a very eligible stranger enters the action and one or another of us has to make a decision which we may regret for the rest of our natural life. In this account, however, you should expect nothing of the kind.

What we'd like to keep close to our vest is the way certain people are triggered into an intimidating silence if any of us so much as looks the wrong way while we listen to instructions over an old short wave radio set out in the garage. When my wife arranges to bring an oversized tablecloth into a high-end shopping emporium in lieu of a budget-busting leukemia outreach campaign, I finally feel free to operate on all cylinders. My mind is racing but my pacing is secure. I know that if even one package is to be found back at the lodge, I will be asked to supply one or more cable TV executives with data-centric compound herbivores before anyone else arrives with an infant broadband solution writ large. Also, it's quite plain that if any of us ever stop giving one hundred and ten percent of our victims' retirement funds to the war effort, then the socially binding sense of shared sacrifice could become just another relic of a more innocent time. That would not be a desired outcome.

The sales slip was all but ironed out, my cardboard cutout was placed on the promontory and a small ration of lip serpos was left under an overwrought beach piling at just the right angle to engage the random passerby in a fruitless search for answers. I was in my 5 o'clock best and the kids were stuck in the back yard trying to remove a suspicious stick from an enigmatic hole. I told my wife that I'd meet with her later at the diner once the flooding became unavoidably serious. She moved back in with her estranged family. I made do with a pre-cut portion of freeze-dried French toast. On or about the thirty-seventh I got it through my thick skull that no one would be showing up for Bible practice anymore. I asked around and learned to my dismay that my bench privileges had seen better days. By which I mean that if you or anyone else squints very hard, they might not have the slightest difficulty digesting some troubling highlights from our quarterly bulletin. As if.

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