A Minor Convenience
Moral dilemnas are not hard to come by.
This was wisdom imparted to me by my late, great Uncle Steve. He had a great sense of humor, a long, flowing beard and locks to match, and wore glasses. He was fascinating. Something from another planet. A planet where they ran around with long hair, glasses so thick you could swear it was doubtful they had eyes, and smelled slightly musty, as if they descended each morning from the attic. I can't say this is the moral compass by which I lived my life, but it made him memorable.
And it made his advice memorable, too. Like the trick for remembering people's names. The one where, if you make a point to notice the person's eye color when you're being introduced to a person the mental connection will have been disturbed enough that the person's name is etched in a special piece of memory that makes it less likely to be forgotten. Whether or not that's how it actually happens, neurologically, is a matter for someone with more years, heck, more hours or minutes spent studying the discipline than I ever have, but I have never, ever forgotten a person's name whose eye color I've also taken care to note, when they've told me their name. Just like I've never forgotten Steve's promise that moral dilemnas would never be hard to come by.
And this is why I was sitting at the bar, just the slosh of a pint left over, the doors had been locked for hours behind us, now, and I was introducing the locals to the Boston Red Sox. Specifically, Boston Red Sox baseball in the seventh game of the ALCS, the only playoff series in which they ever seemed to go seven games any more.
My Uncle Steve, God Rest His Soul, also always said: You make your own luck.
How I wish that were true. As it was, I had bent that aphorism to my own whim, and had decided that, whilst in Rome, I wouldn't be content to do with doing what the Romans do (which would more likely than not be to ignore the baseball entirely), but that I would make my own fan base, commandeering a television in the gentlest of ways, handing out a collection of Red Sox baseball caps my wife had originally, well, and still, to be honest, questioned the value of bringing, all the way to Ireland, and begging and pleading to remain locked in the pub so long as those boys were out there playing in Eastern Standard Time.
The moral dilemna came not from corrupting the poor lads, keeping them locked up in the pub when surely they'd rather be home, sleeping it off, getting ready for an early morning yoga session. It wasn't my borderline boorish behavior that no doubt sent a few of the locals home to their other halves to complain about loud Americans ruining the pub with their slow-moving, incomprehensible game. It was that, here we were, visiting my wife's family on the west coast of Ireland, and she was down the road, in the Limerick Maternity Hospital, possibly giving birth to our third child. While I sat in the pub in the bottom of the sixth, the dilemna growing greater and greater each passing second. And without a powered up cellphone.
disclaimer:
This is not an excerpt from the book (in serial form) The Man's Guide to Not Being Pregnant. Just like last week. That was also not part of that book. Wait, it was.
This is an excerpt from... something else. We'll tell you what it is, maybe, in the future. So if you're a time traveler, head on out and let us know what we wind up telling you. Because I don't even know, to be hones twith you.
Until that future, sit tight, keep checking in with us, and keep on reading. Thanks.
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