A Daily Life

It had been a bad day. It was meant to be, from the beginning, what with the early morning appointment with the agent, and the afternoon class, and the headmaster's insistence on our talking that particular day about my performance these last few months in his precious little, backwoods country, primary school. And all this just the day after I had decided to tell my mother I was moving out and setting up my own place and the arguments and the long weeping harangue that followed. That I had just broken up with my longtime girlfriend and was in no state of mind to think, let alone act, intelligently seemed completely lost on one and all, as they insisted in their most impressively scholarly tones, Carpe Diem. Carpe Diem indeed! I had duly woken up late in the mess that was my friend's apartment, having moved in with my toothbrush and briefcase late the previous night, the alarm clock a long-discarded luxury in his blissfully unworkmanlike existence which needed not the least bit of the hurried step or the simplest creasing of the wrinkled forehead with worry and anxiety. Breakfast has always been a weakness and when I had to skip it to reach the agent's office only an hour late, the rumble in my stomach was merely aggravated by the incompetence of a man of professed good taste, indeed of such a disposition as to claim to be the arbiter to the mass that is the people in matters literary, and yet of such dullness as to make grey seem the most vivid of colours on a winter afternoon when the sun has mixed the slush with the snow and has hidden himself behind the passing cloud that does not pass; and he decided to irritate me with the most obtuse questions that have through all recorded history been left best unanswered by all who claim to any intelligence whatsoever. I ventured, given the befuddled state that my mind was in, to remonstrate and retorted in as educated a manner as was possible at that instant and the result was that I was thrown out most decorously after an hour's worth of nothing done. The time, having already inched towards that period, when I am in the habit of having a second and much more elaborate meal than breakfast, I decided to put the troubles of the last hour behind me and attacked the cafeteria attached to the school(the school being but ten minutes' walk from the agent's, I made that trip all too easily). As fortune would have it, the cafeteria was closed for the day and, the only person I could have hoped to avoid in the cafeteria, given the private lunches he was accustomed to having in the comfort of his own office, the headmaster, most heartily beamed at me in the middle of his serious conversation with the cook, and with all the subtlety of an ox working a sledgehammer, informed me of the pleasure with which he would evaluate(negatively - that was given) my performance in the last few months at the meeting he had scheduled that evening. Heaven forbid any child should have to sit in class when a hungry, angry, hurt, confused, bitter, desperate man, recently wounded when still smarting under old wounds, is designated the teacher. Heaven forbid doubly that such a man should have a conscience and have to teach a class of the most unruly and rambunctious bumpkins who have been selected from the wealthiest set of family fools in the county to torture to death penniless schoolmasters dreaming of discharging social obligations in all manner of saccharine asininity. And then the meeting and still the hunger. I couldn't take it much longer. This was stuff that breaks the backs of giants. So I resigned at the first comical outburst that the headmaster had practised all week long in front of the mirror, calculating on impressing and intimidating me. Little did he know I was broken already. And I limped out to the lake by the woods and grabbed my handful of grass and sat by the shore. Waiting. Of course nothing happened. Except for a little girl who came around the big brown tree, crying in that most cheering way children cry when they are merely confused at the big bad world they haven't yet understood completely, innocent with doe-eyes wide and red, dragging her little doll in the tall grass. Her nose she had lost to her friend who had run away home with it and she had to be home soon and she could not go home without her nose - her mother had always warned her not to lose anything or she would not let her play any more. Children, I thought, and placed a piece of my nose on her face, taking her to the lake to prove she had a nose now too, for she wouldn't be satisfied with touching it - it had always felt so, even when the boy had taken her nose away. Children and fools and fool headmasters; agents who did not know and people who did not care or understand; friends who did not have to go through what I had to everyday and yet ventured to advise; hunger and necessity and the trials of a nature never kind to one who was beaten and knew it; pain and the lack of release; indecision; insufficiency; doubt; a hundred other things that made a man bitter and desperate and angry and contemptible and sad. And then the girl smiled and said, "You are the awesomest" and kissed me and ran away smiling gaily. And I felt happy.