AND THEN THERE WERE THREE

"we should say hello," he says, because he hates it when he runs into people whom he's met and they turn away when their eyes meet, as soon as he's about to greet them. i agree, more or less, with the sentiment, although i don't always act on it in practice. to be sure, i'd been the one who'd turned us away when the man we'd met those weeks before near the dart board at that other place had seemed to recognize us. it was less awful if we didn't see his face make the transition to familiarity. but then later i ask if he doesn't remember meeting that other guy that other day, and he says that we should put ourselves back in a position where we can say hello. because he hates that. i, i say, hate that we're going to force ourselves into a conversation. but he says that we'll just say hello and leave. because he wants to have friends here when i inevitably leave, he says. i turn to him slowly, and i quickly give him a smirk that smacks of a recent transition to too much familiarity. and then we go to the bar and say hello. the man from those weeks ago remembers us but doesn't remember our names. he is all smiles. and of course he wants to go to that other place and play pool or something with us, and of course we have to say yes, and not just because that other place was the place where we'd been planning to go after we'd said hello and left. these things are, of course, the things that always start with something like a friendly game of pool. but before we can get to all the other things we have to get to that other place and to the pool table to have that game, which turns into a few or several, during which i find myself proclaiming that of course there were nazis in the government of the federal republic. and when he tells me (after telling us about his three years in cologne) that my appeal to incontrovertible "historical fact" smacks of religious fanaticism, i remind him that (my cousin) his beloved chancellor is a representative of the christian democratic union. and so yes, the sovereign debt crisis (as the north has decided to term the fallout of its colonization of the south) is just german business as usual. i pontificate. we argue about extraterrestrial life. is the concept related philosophically to our perception of our happiness on earth? a tallboy of labatt blue is just two dollars, and so he still thinks the both of us are really cute. plus, he likes contention. and then there were three. that's what you get for saying hello. but at breakfast the next morning i don't have a puzzle so i have time to think, and all i can think, over the worrisome pound of my heartbeat and so far away from my soapbox, is that i can't be sure who it was who picked up whom -- although i was absolutely right about those nazis.