By some accounts, Sandy and Nestor’s friendship had not always wreaked havoc. There were early photos of them skateboarding, sunning themselves by a pool, sharing a soda at the miniature golf emporium over on Hudson Street. Sandy’s mom could point proudly to a black & white photo of the two of them, anchoring the left side of an infield in their “Mutual of Omaha” Little League uniforms. Nothing was broken. Nothing was bleeding. Nobody was crying.

Oscar Jarvis, their chain-smoking, gum-chewing, sixth grade teacher accepted none of this data. By mid-year he had seen enough damage to order the two of them separated by as much distance as possible.

The note he put in each of their files would, for years to come, be the clearest and most prescient diagnosis.

“It is not that either of them is a bad child,” he’d written. “Rather it’s the rare combination of their blind spots and worst instincts. My experience in our class partnering exercises is that most children, paired to a task, can recognize and utilize each other’s strengths. That’s not the case with these two. Instead, their’s is a synergy for havoc. They possess an uncanny tendency to exacerbate the worst in each other.”

Image via Wikimedia

Angela McReynolds, their middle school guidance counselor, had never seen a note such as this. Her initial reaction is that it was a mean thing to say; borderline inappropriate. But this was before she’d summoned the two of them to meet with her, together, to begin gathering her own impressions.

Their meeting seemed to have gone well enough. The boys answered mostly with bemused facial expressions and, when they spoke, they politely agreed with her suggestion that they were misunderstood and that the new atmosphere, and new responsibilities of middle school, would help them mature.

When Ms. McReynolds was finished, she blithely walked them out, to show them to the cafeteria. When she returned, she discovered that her large aquarium had overflowed, leaving swordtails and guppies to perform gasping, walking catfish impressions on her new carpet, and doing $5,000 worth of water damage to the classroom below.

Ms. McReynolds did not connect her visit with the two young men with the horrid, swampy mess her office had become.

At least not at first.

As in:

“So what is that, really?” Brian asked as he peered through the oven window to where the main dish was being kept warm.

“Poached haddock,” Meg answered as she continued to shred a small block of romano for the crab & asparagus appetizer.

Image via Wikimedia

“Is that a fish?” Brian asked, playfully acting dumb.

She didn’t reply. Meg never suffered fools, not even the ones she dated.

Dianne was a few minutes late on account of the traffic, but she was happy as a lark when she arrived, tastefully perfumed, with hints of wild rose and sage.

Meg waited until they’d consumed most of the appetizers and uncorked the second bottle of wine before tapping her own wine glass with a spoon.

“I have an announcement to make.”

“I knew it!” Brian interjected. “The haddock was braised, not poached!”

“Nope,” Meg answered. “It was poached by the book. And I’m leaving for San Francisco in two weeks.”

Brian squinted and bumped his lips out, as if to say “you are?”

“For good,” Meg continued.

Dianne and Brian exchanged bewildered glances.

The silence began to be awkward.

“Was it something I said?” Brian offered, trying to leaven the moment.

“No,” Meg said. “But it was something I heard that I needed to listen to. And I hope neither of you mind that I brought you together this evening.”

Dianne blushed.

Brian stared into one of the candles on the table, clearly at a loss for words.

“You guys need a moment?” Dianne interjected in response to Brian’s pained expression.

Brian took a deep breath and exhaled.

“I think this is a good time for me to use the bathroom,” Dianne continued.

“Yeah, why don’t I do that. Kind of need to anyway.”

1. Any portable wire fence.

2. A long fishing line with many hooks.

3. A line upon which maritime flags are flown.

Answer to last Wednesday’s Word quiz:

Smoot: Narrow passageway.

The Wednesday word quiz is composed by C.R. Roberts.

When Dave Schlanz, at 35, had the day of his wildest dreams, a day better than any of his birthdays, even his fourth birthday, he was given the southwest corner office at the Hartfeldt Family Foundation.

“Jeezus you’re kidding me,” he’d replied when Beth, with a tight smile, disclosed his promotion and his new digs.

Out one of the sixth floor windows you could look straight as a knife down Pearl Street with its elegant, wrought iron lamp posts and hanging flower baskets boiling over with nasturtiums. Out the other window you could see all the way to the flags fluttering atop the bridge over the tidal basin.

To his credit, he never even considered that he deserved it, or even that it would last very long. The Hartfeldts were a stolid, conservative lot who tended to treat change as a social infection.

Dave was very much the opposite. Change was his nutrition, and he gobbled at it as though it were a large dish of Jolly Ranchers. The company psychologist had diagnosed him, early on, as having attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. But then Dave easily brain-stormed a list of reasons why treatment was not an option. When the psychologist pressed the point, Dave began singing Paul Anka’s “My Way,” which, for good emphasis, he could also sing in French.  As he well understood, his improbable success was due only to his ability to outwork his incessant lack of focus, to find a way to inexorably overcome one self-inflicted interruption after another.

And there were so many welcomed interruptions, beginning with the ever-buzzing Blackberry, and continuing with the Pavlovian pinging from his laptop. It wasn’t just the electronica. It could be the sight of an attractive jogger making her way up the parkway along Pearl Street, or even the appearance of a lonely tangerine rolling into the aisle between the cubicles where the interns worked. It was small, it was orange, it was funny. He just had to stop everything to learn where the little fruit had come from.

There was, to be sure, something of a professional death wish to this sort of conduct at Hartfeldt and for reasons that were unclear, even to Dave, he did little to disguise his addiction to methodical escapism. Within a month of inhabiting his hallowed space, he was even joking about his affliction to his underlings.

When his top assistant made the mistake of lingering after Tuesday’s staff meeting, he literally walked to her, tipped the back of her chair forward, and began ushering her out the door of his office.

“I’m sorry Sharon,” he readily confessed, “I’m overdue for my next distraction.”

Fourteen months after the tragic accident, Thad still wasn’t sure he could keep his friend from the abyss. There would be good days, even good weeks, when it appeared the blood was returning to Lars’s face. But then something else would surface from the depths of his loss and his eyes would again go flat; his once voluble voice reduced to strained whispers.

In the week after Christmas, Lars had been scanning Gretchen’s laptop computer in search of a password when he tumbled, unexpectedly, into a folder of video files. He clicked on the first one and was shocked to suddenly hear his adopted daughter’s six-year old voice.

“I want to see it fly away,” Maia said, as gleeful as could be.

All that was visible in the screen was a silver, helium-filled birthday balloon and a cerulean sky. She said “goodbye” as it quickly rose into the heavens. The symbolism was heartbreaking, and the fact that Lars could hear his daughter’s forever six-years-old voice but not see her in the video made it all the more painful and surreal.

Without hesitating, he clicked to the next video in the folder. Now Maia was experimenting with the little camera, shooting straight down at her feet as she walked along the sidewalk where she and a friend had used purple and orange chalk to make a griddle of hopscotch. The only sound was the playful slap of her soles on the concrete. The next clip was of the same little white sneakers swishing through the grass of the lawn.

It was as though Lars had rediscovered his daughter, only to lose her again. And it didn’t help to be reminded that the laptop had survived the accident, but not Gretchen, and not Maia.

There was no way Thad was going to let Lars stew in this unexpected reprise of his loss.

“Have your skis ready,” he said politely over the phone. “I’ll be there at seven-thirty.”

By late morning, they’d reached a ridge near 6,000 feet from where they could see for at least a hundred miles into the heart of the snow-blanketed Pasayten wilderness. The early January sun had already reached its apex and was sandwiched between the illuminated landscape and a thin, golden cloud deck that distilled and burnished the light.

Lars stopped on the ridge to study the moment and Thad joined him, waiting a full minute before gently posing a question.

“What are ya thinking’?”

Lars exhaled for effect but kept his gaze on the distant peaks.

“Life is beautiful,” he answered.