A few months ago I was at the tavern down the street having breakfast with a friend of mine. In this tavern, there are four booths that sit in a neat row between the bar and the area with the pool tables and video poker machines. My friend and I sat in one of the booths. It was barely 10 o’clock in the morning so it was fairly quiet. Fairly quiet, that is, until a couple seated themselves two booths away. Without seeing either one of them (my back was to them), I heard the woman say to the waitress, who she spoke to in an easy and familiar way:
He’s my husband now.
I love that line. It’s not going to change the course of history – or probably anyone’s life for that matter – but it is quite a statement not because of what it says but because of what it could say. Does the word “now” imply that the woman and the man have been a couple for a certain period of time and that they’re now married? That’s the most likely scenario, I suppose. Or is the “now” added on to the end of the sentence in the way that southern people sometimes say “Ya’ll come back now,” which does not, in spite of the sequencing, mean to return at the instant the command “come back” is uttered. Or should the emphasis be on the word “he”? As in, someone else was her husband previously but now he is her husband. Or, my favorite option, for some reason: He used to be someone else’s husband, but now … The woman’s voice didn’t emphasize one possibility over another, so I’ll do it for her: He’s my husband now.
The second phrase that keeps gallivanting through my mind involves animals. A woman I’m working with revealed one Friday afternoon that she had not yet sent the work we’ve been doing to those who need to review and approve it. “My bad,” she said, which I must admit is sort of gracious, all things considered. But here’s the problem: According to the almighty workback schedule, this sharing of documents should have happened two weeks prior to our Friday afternoon chit chat. So rather than saying what immediately came to mind (which was “Why in the hell did I bust my ass to get stuff to you according to schedule if you’re not going to do anything with it?”) I very nonchalantly asked what these reviewers and approvers had to say about the fact that here we are nearing the end of June (the end of FY10-11!!!!) and they’ve received nothing to review or approve. “Oh,” said the woman, “they’re as nervous as tom cats.”
Yes indeed, tom cats. This one resonated with me in a number of ways. The first is that two or three days prior to this conversation I was telling someone what it is like to work with this woman, and without thinking about it I described her voice as “slithery.” Which struck me, when I thought about it, as a term you’d use not to describe a voice but to describe a cat. So it was funny, and kind of uncomfortable, when she brought up the tom cats. For a split second I wondered if she’d been listening in on my griping. And that made me nervous, not as nervous as a tom cat, necessarily, but nervous all the same.
But then I wondered about the word nervous. Are the tom cats nervous because it’s getting to be the end of the fiscal year and they’ve got too much to do? Are the tom cats nervous because reviewing and approving marketing documents that no remotely sane individual is ever going to read is a weighty responsibility that most of us couldn’t begin to comprehend? Or are the tom cats nervous because they know – based on their own painful experiences – that anything coming across the wire from this woman is bound to be a complete disaster and require them to waste hours just trying to determine what in the hell it is that she is asking them to do? And just to take that a step or two further, by mentioning the tom cats and their nervousness, is this client of mine acknowledging her ineptness and, if that’s the case, is her acknowledgement intentional or was it just yet another example of her ad-hoc, slap-dash approach to everything? Or was she kind of pleased with herself, proud of the fact that the mere mention and/or sight of her name can make even those damn tom cats nervous? Because I am here to tell you, the sight of her name in my e-mail inbox is enough to inspire me to do anything, absolutely anything, to postpone opening the message, including wiping down the bottles of cleanser sitting on the top shelf of the kitchen closet.
It all fell apart, ultimately, as do most things with this woman. I started wondering about tom cats, and to me, they’re sort of sexy and tough and macho and smoky. And they’re nervous over some slide decks regurgitated by the marketing team? For me that’s where it fell apart to a point that’s beyond repair.
