Allow me to tell you a story. Somewhere around 18 years ago, I answered the phone in the house in Mill Valley where I was staying at the time. The owner of the house was a writer of mystery stories, and she had fallen in love with a Norwegian sailor and was spending some time over in Norway with him.
I was a newly separated, married man in his early 40's, part of a sort of underground network of men taken care of by an underground group of women. Other men much like me occupied the other rooms on her property.
We rarely asked each other many questions, and we pretended not to notice when our various girlfriends showed up to spend the night. It was a bachelor pad, more or less, except for the female cat who used to love to position herself in the bathtub, sucking each drop of water as it slowly emerged courtesy of what must have been an eroded washer.
My latest roommate in this house happened to be a U.S. Senator. He was a courtly fellow, not here to see a lover but here to try and fix his back. He was visiting the same sports doctor who had recently saved the career of the legendary football player, Joe Montana.
For whatever reason, this powerful politician didn't want anyone to know he was undergoing treatment for his back problem. We became temporary buddies of a sort, mainly because we both liked books. He was interested in the ones I had written (he had an environmentalist streak) and we shared a deep interest in the novels of Faulkner, one of the most difficult of all American writers.
As a Southerner, my housemate quite naturally appreciated Faulkner. Finding out that I, an intellectual from Michigan, also did must have come as something of a shock to him. Anyway, he invited me to start going out with him to local bars, which I was not averse to, though at the time, I was trying to avoid self-medication, since I was trying to pursue some serious therapy and understand what the hell was happening to me in what apparently was an explosive midlife crisis. Therefore, when I went with him, I ordered bubbly water, instead of alcohol.
(Note: I did not succeed in figuring this mystery out then, nor have I since.)
Well, back to that phone call. The caller was Senator George Mitchell, (D-Maine), who at that point was the majority's head of the U.S. Senate. He was seeking my housemate, but I didn't know which bar my Southern friend might then be visiting, so I just took a message.
"George Mitchell called. Call him back."
Such is the rhythm of life. Live long enough and you gain these memories. I was reminded of that old phone call tonight as I read that the very same, now-retired Ex-Sen. Mitchell, is apparently prepared to issue his report on steroids in baseball.
That is something that you, dear reader, understand is of more than passing interest to me.
-30-
No comments:
Post a Comment