Thud
Went to a party tonight. Found myself talking to a guy with a vaguely familiar, and not at all common last name. So I asked if he was any relation to a guy I was briefly involved with in, like, 1983. "Oh yes," chap says happily. "He's my Dad."
Thud.
'Cause I realize now that I used to hear stories about =this guy= when he was 12, after the weekends his father had had him visit (the parents were divorced). This guy who now has gray hair and looks, I swear, my age. I don't exactly know why I found this unsettling, but I did. So the guy fires off an email to his dad, saying that I'd said Hello.
For what it's worth, I loaned the father my copy of the Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker in 1983, and he still has it somewhere. I should have asked his son to inquire after it.
Thud.
'Cause I realize now that I used to hear stories about =this guy= when he was 12, after the weekends his father had had him visit (the parents were divorced). This guy who now has gray hair and looks, I swear, my age. I don't exactly know why I found this unsettling, but I did. So the guy fires off an email to his dad, saying that I'd said Hello.
For what it's worth, I loaned the father my copy of the Collected Short Stories of Dorothy Parker in 1983, and he still has it somewhere. I should have asked his son to inquire after it.
posted by Madeleine Robins at 11:28 PM
4 Comments:
Oh my God, Mad. I'd have died. How...almost incestuous, kind of, sort of. Weird.
Incestuous is about as close as I can come to expressing it. All through the party I kept feeling like I was the only one there who knew about the elephant sitting there next to the couch. So odd.
I assume, Mad, that when you "asked if he was any relation to a guy I was briefly involved with," you said, "Are you any relation to =Malachai= McLooleehatchie?", not "Any relation to Malachai, with whom I was once briefly involved?"
(Interesting how the syntax of English allows that ambiguity to be nested in there.)
Got it in one, Greg, since somehow saying "the Malachi McLooleehatchie I slept with?" involved disbursement of more information than I was comfortable with.
I'd be fascinated to know what sort of response the son's email evoked at the other end, but I'll probably never know. and that's probably just as well.
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