Mouth Honour

Now that I’m retired, people don’t quite know how to talk to me. They’re curious, but cautious –after all, they’re talking to an old man. Retirement is a kingdom far away and over a fence for most people. It is a land cloaked in eternal shadows, a place where people talk loudly, and canes, not swords, hang on the coat rack beside the faded pictures of those long gone. A realm where memories are indistinguishable from reality. A place of unhurried rest. I hate that.

But I suppose that’s what I saw when I was living prairie-like as a younger man and looked at the mountainous horizon ahead, full, not of peaks so much as troughs –valleys in which, once entered, I would be forever trapped. Well, I see it differently now, and although there is a certain sense in which I find myself confined, it’s a verbal prison, not one of steep cliffs.

The voice is like a muscle –it atrophies without constant exercise. Even its children, words, get lost if they’re not chaperoned, or at least analyzed at the table. There’s an unanticipated vacuum lurking in retirement for some of us. Unseen and largely unmeasured, it steals upon the unwary like a cirrus cloud on a winter’s day: adialogia. Okay, I just made that word up, and anyway, even for me, it’s only hypodialogia –I do speak occasionally to the cat, and in periods of exceptional verbal drought when the cat is out playing with mice, I speak to wrong numbers on the phone.

What this does, of course, is weaken the cords. I mean it’s not like I can talk very long to the mirror without running out of stuff to say –especially when the other guy keeps interrupting. And it’s not like at the office, where I had to be an active listener and an even more athletic answerer –people expect answers, if that’s why they came to you in the first place. So in those days, I got my exercise at work; these days, my voice is becoming obese –or whatever happens when it just sits around and lollygags its way through a rainy day.

But humans have not evolved this far without an uncanny ability to cope. To improvise. If the mountain will not come to the senior, why then, the senior must go to the mountain. Of course, even though there are a lot of mountains near where I live, I’d still be doing a monologue with the trees. I decided on Starbucks instead.

Even there though, it’s location, location, location. And similar to the housing market, you can’t always get what you want when you want it. Ideally, a table smack in the middle would allow a multi-quadrant exposure to potential ears, but one must adapt. Wasn’t it Camus’ Étranger, Meursault who said he could adapt even if he were lying in a hollow log looking up at the sky? Well, anyway, I thought that was what he said until I couldn’t find it.

At any rate, I decided to take whatever table I could find as a trial run, and then figure out an exaptation. And, of course, as luck and the morning addiction would have it, I was relegated to a table in a dark corner near the washrooms. I suppose it was a bit pathetically fallacious, though, because I decided to splurge on a Venti, dark (with room for milk) -I didn’t want to run out of coffee before I found someone to talk at… sorry, talk to.

The problem with too much coffee, apart from the obvious –which I figured I had aced- is that it shifts word production into overdrive, and I found so many wandering around in my mouth that I just had to let some of them out. There was an older woman sitting at the next table glancing every so often towards the door as if she were expecting somebody. She had enough napkins on her table for a bridge game, so I realized I had an opportunity.

“Excuse me,” I said, with a desperate smile on my face, “I seem to have forgotten to get a napkin. May I borrow one of yours?” Weak I suppose, but words were pounding frantically on my teeth to be let out.

She turned her head and examined me for a moment. “Borrow?” she finally said, her face trying to achieve some form of equanimity, while her fingers sorted through the pile to find one that wasn’t already soiled with spilled coffee. “Here,” she added when she happened upon a relatively dry one. “But I want it back when you’re finished, eh?” Her eyes twinkled at the thought, and a row of spotless dentures surfaced briefly.

I hadn’t expected the ‘eh’ for some reason and it threw me off. The only thing I could think of was a brief lip-wipe, and then a rapid redeployment of said napkin back onto her pile. “Thank you, ma’am,” I said, trying to make my now-clean lips appear grateful for the shine. But I shouldn’t have let my guard down, and a few more words burst out as if I hadn’t screwed the cap on quickly enough. “I really should have brought a few more over to my table when I got the milk and sugar so I could have returned the loan with interest…” I managed to stem the flow briefly, before some more spilled out. “Of course, if I had my own, then I wouldn’t have needed to borrow from your stash, so…” I had a quick sip of what was left of my Venti to discourage another prison break.

First she glanced at the barely-soiled napkin returnee and then turned the full force of her eyes on me. “But then we wouldn’t have been able to engage in this intriguing conversation either… Would we?” Her face softened and she unhooked her eyes from my cheeks and let them fly back to the door again.

But my words were milling around inside still, now excited that some of them had been able to escape. I could almost hear the vowels begging for a ride on the consonants so they wouldn’t be left behind if the doors opened again. I decided to go for it. “Well, if there’s ever anything I can do for you to return the favour, just look for me at this table, eh?” When I saw her eyes narrow, I immediately regretted my choice for parole. Of all the words banging around in there, why did I let that group out?

I have to say she did smile –well sort of. It was more the kind of expression you see on politicians’ faces when somebody heckles them at a rally. A kind of polite dismissal. The words inside suddenly fell silent and I could hear them taking their seats again, embarrassed at their usually well behaved colleagues’ improprieties. They weren’t going to be accused of Aspergering their way out. For a while, anyway.

And in the quiet that followed their abashed capitulation, I became aware of another voice from another region, gesticulating silently for my attention. I smiled and touched her sleeve as a sign of apology and headed for the washroom. But when I returned, I found that my table had already been taken by two other women, both talking to my new friend. They all fell silent when I reappeared, however, and their eyes bespoke a certain trepidation –like children wondering if they’d been overheard.

“I’m sorry, sir,” my lady said, pretending surprise, then glancing at her friends as if to say they would probably need the rest of her napkins. “I thought you’d left…”

I bowed slightly and smiled a weak acquiescence. My lips were more comfortable now but I thought maybe I’d order a cookie-to-go from the counter. Perhaps the barista would listen to me for a while if I took some time to choose…