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Bud Grossmann’s
Words of the Week
for the Week of
May 4, 2014
Previously unpublished fiction.
© 2014 by Bud Grossmann.
All Rights Reserved.
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Crewel Embroidery, 1974
© 1974 by Bud Grossmann
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ANTI-CLIMAXES FOR LOVERS
OF CLASSIC FILMS
I
am going to tell you about something that happened just this past Thursday, on the first day of May in 2014. It’s one of those I-shoulda-said stories, and maybe this tale would have made more sense if I had told it to you in 1967 or in 1974, but, I’m sorry, it happened just last week, about forty-seven years after when you might have had an easier time of it, although, as I think of it now, a couple days later, it would have been just as dumb back then, but just as chuckle-out-loud funny to me.
On May the first, I was driving my dad to a ten a.m. dental appointment in Portage, a “big” city up the road from the little Wisconsin town where I live. We had left about five minutes early because I wanted to drop off a document at my lawyer’s office. This is for something my lawyer and I have been procrastinating on, one of us or the other, back and forth, for going on eight years now. Until last Thursday it had been more than a year since I had stepped inside the law office.
So. We get there, Dad and I, and I park in front, and we’re doing okay for time, not in a giant rush, but I shouldn’t dawdle, so I jump out of the car and trot over to the double oak doors and through the next set of double oak doors, and go up to the counter high as my chest, behind which counter sits, as I now recall, a nice-looking white woman, age maybe late thirties, whom I don’t think I’ve ever seen before, and I glance at a large engraved nameplate on the counter, which says, I think, and probably this is so,
KATRINA E. ROTH
RECEPTIONIST
and I greet her not by name but I say, probably with a smile, and definitely in my cheery, charming voice, “Good morning!” This takes, of course, like four seconds. No one else is in the waiting area in front of the receptionist’s counter; I see no one else in the spacious office area beyond it. The nice-looking white woman gives me what I have come to call, in my eight years of residency in this state, a Wisconsin Welcome, which is to say, a silent stare, or maybe a murmured “Good morning” without a smile. Straight out of Lake Wobegon. I interpret the woman’s facial expression as probably a look of mild surprise: Who are you, sir, so obviously not an official bearer of manila envelopes, bursting in here with no appointment?
So that’s my first four seconds inside the law office. In the next four seconds, I ceremoniously present to the woman behind the counter my plump nine-by-twelve manila envelope with my rubber-stamped name, address, and phone number in the upper left corner and my lawyer’s name and the honorific Esq. in bold Sharpie print across the middle. I give her two seconds, then, to look it over and to raise her eyes again to mine, whereupon I cheerily say, “See you again soon!”—a cryptic reference to a May 14 appointment already set in ink—and return to the outside world through the double-double doors. A quarter of a minute, couldn’t have taken much more.
And then, in the next thirty seconds, the time it took me to return to my Subaru with my passenger parked at the curb, I began chuckling at the realization of what I shoulda said to her. I had perceived the nameplate to say “Katharine E. Roth,” and what I wish I had done was point to the nameplate and said with a facetious sincerity and with what I hope would have been an ice-melting twinkle in my eye, “Heyyyy! I just saw you in The Graduate a couple nights ago. But without the lithp!”
O
kay, fine. You don’t like my story, and you’re old enough to get my joke? You are looking at me all stony-faced, are you? Fine, good, that’s all right, I don’t care. But once my new trust and will are sealed and signed, I will be ready to die, and I am hoping that laughter will be noted on my death certificate as the cause of my demise. ♦
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Thanks! BUD GROSSMANN
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