“Did you get my prescription”

“Not ready”

“OK”

“For what again”

“The usual”

“OK so they say you never called in”

“I didnt I thought you said it was ready? Otehr day. Nvrmd lets get lunch”

“Meet you there”

“Wait where we never said!” And I’ll spare you the rest, as here I gave up on both texting and automated refills, and fucking called her already.

She had said Panera, but I said Via Lago, and she agreed. We went there with my son. A bite or two in, sitting at a nice table eating good food from actual plates, she said, “God, we should never go to Panera. Remind me, the next time we have to take my mother to lunch in town, to just come here? She hates Panera.”

“Of course! I hate Panera too.”

Why, then, is that place always more crowded than this one? It’s not any cheaper. Why does anyone want to get jostled and barked at to get handed a greasy blinking vibrator, and then a crappy sandwich? I dwell on this not just to promote a local shop at the expense of a chain. Put aside whatever smug jollies we’re supposed to get from supporting small business, and wonder why people as particular, privileged, and empowered as you, my wife, and I sometimes settle for crappy sandwiches, conversations, and experiences.

—

“Do you have plans for the weekend, Alan?” I was walking back and forth by the front of my office, by the coffee pot and fridge. It puts me within easy earshot of questions like that, from Angela at the front desk, which is fine with me. Not that I had anything interesting planned.

“Ahh, nothing too exciting. Gonna change the oil in our cars. Get them all ready for winter.” Angela stayed quiet. I thought I might get a reply from Dan, whose desk is there too, and who works on his own cars and has opinions on everyone’s, but no. Was he busy or waiting for a better offer? I kept talking just because. “I guess my mother-in-law might be in town…which is ok I guess. Not…I think my wife would prefer she didn’t come this weekend.”

“Why?” Now Amanda has something to say. I stop moving and stood by her desk.

“Oh, it’s not really a big deal,” I continued. “She comes a lot I guess. And we have to sort of plan the day around her. Which isn’t the end of the world. I think it bothers her more than me. My wife I mean. Though I’d rather – ”

“Can’t you just? I don’t know…” Angela replied louder and more forcefully than I’d expected. “She can’t look after the kids while you go out? Doesn’t she help? I mean maybe if you could – “

“My kids are older, it’s not that…I mean we do go out. It’s just. I don’t know, the way we have to kind of rearrange everything.”

Now I felt defensive. Did I sound defensive? I felt like I sounded defensive. I stepped away from her desk and fought the urge to run back to mine. I was getting advice. Why didn’t I use it? Or at least acknowledge it gratefully. Didn’t I ask for advice? Well, I didn’t not ask for advice. Looking back from an empty room on another day, I can say I wasn’t asking for advice. I was just asking for it.

I was complaining, so why shouldn’t Angela help? Why did I tell her about a problem if I didn’t want help? And something about hearing us made Dan talk too, about how HE tells HIS family to drop in whenever they want. Door’s always open! Is that advice? It’s a statement about him that’s a question about me. If he can be so magnanimous to his relatives, why can’t I?

Do I have an answer? From this other day, sure. The answer is that talking is sharing, sharing is giving, in giving we get. Tell people about yourself and you get people on your self. Busybodies are a natural gift, like autumn leaves and snowflakes. Are you alive? Do you depend on other living things for every little thing? Well here’s your rake, and find your shovel.

—

I have been listening to an old album this week. It is a bargain-bin jazz CD that I had on cassette twenty years ago. The disc is new but my memory of its sound was old and faint, which is fortunate. It meant so little to my memory that I wasn’t afraid of going back and ruining it.

Are you ever afraid of ruining music you like? This begs the question of why you like it. Are your preferences etched in place by something intrinsic to that batch of noises, to which you respond psychologically with perfect fidelity, the same way on the thousandth play as you did on the first? If so, you’re a finer instrument than I’ll ever be.

I can’t separate my feelings for music from the tuneless things associated with it. Car music, basement music, club and kitchen, full and empty glass music. The sound of my high school bedroom’s end-table-sized old-even-then speakers playing my new cassette of old Doors songs; all landfill and head-fill now, though I’d love to push my finger against the golden-toned fabric behind the wood-like speaker grille.

I don’t have any Doors music today, nor do I want any, though sometimes I listen when it comes out of the car radio. Radio songs say nothing and mean nothing, and disappear like fast-food wrappers. Yet I still listen to the radio everyday, which I attribute to my fear of using up my favorite things.  If I played my favorite music in the car, over and over, it would soon just remind me of commuting, or worse.

I had one album I left in my car during my first summer of post-college work. Every morning for a month I’d pass a dead hawk in the 128 breakdown lane. Every day it decomposed a little more, without ever quite vanishing. Ever since, if you ask me how I feel about G-Love and Special Sauce, expect to hear more about this big rotting bird I once knew.

So mostly, when driving, I listen to the radio. A jumbled mix of somethings signifying nothing, like relationship advice from near-strangers, or a crappy sandwich in a wrapper. A set of un-suggestive sensations, to get us through a gap on the way to something better. But what?

***

Herbie Hancock’s “Head Hunters,” that’s what. I’d heard it before, but not too much to stop me from trying it again, dead birds be damned. The songs are long and involved, but light and engaging, and the musicians shift speed and emphasis and mood. On Friday after work, after the conversation about my mother-in-law visiting, I got in the car and made it very loud.

I came home wanting a party, a smoke, a drink, a hundred things I don’t have or even really want. I had a quiet evening where I complained, only a little, to my wife, and she sympathized. I made a mental list of old friends to talk to, though I dread “catching up.” Why ruin our memories with the crap happening now? Dear lord, don’t make me talk about work. Or the people at my office. Or the people in my house. Or me. But what do I have to talk about but, well, all of this?

By midday Saturday, I’d had a lovely lunch with my wife and son. (My mother-in-law isn’t coming until next weekend.) We talked about current events and costumes. We drove home, listening to my new album, and my son liked how it sounded like the chit-chat of analog robots. Then she and I went to Harvard Square and tried on hats, and drank coffee watching the pretty and homely people, and then moved rapidly past the lousy busker who couldn’t sing but did anyway. We did it without laughing at him, at least until we were sure he couldn’t hear us. I went to a bookstore and listened to a jerk berate a cashier. I gave thanks for not working retail any more. I bought a new-new still-wrapped copy of a forty-year-old book I loved twenty years ago, but had loaned out to a guy who still has it, I wonder, ten years later?

I wondered about my old friend Elizabeth, who lives in Cambridge, or did, and then (I am not making this up) I came home to a message from her. We haven’t spoken in at least a year. “Hey Stranger,” it started, and now I’m rushing writing this, hurrying on to a lunch of lousy leftovers so I can then write back to her, to hear where she lives now and tell some new stories about my same self again, dead birds be damned.