Enough Time

[Written circa 2005]

Enough Time

       By Douger Reimlas

All the innovations in fiction and poetry have already earlier been affected on Saturday Night Live. Our literary elite would not appreciate this insight as definitive but would wish to qualify it in order themselves to come out justified. It is up to latter day realists cum postmodernists to defend their uses of these by calling what they themselves do serious literature worthy of considerations, as in the case of creative writing graduates for Ph.D. status.

An  attractive woman asked me for a quarter at the parking lot outside St. John's College. She was in a hurry to get to class and was short the change. She'd thought she had some, she explained, but there were only loonies and toonies in her purse. I gave it to her and told her not to worry her pretty head about such a triviality. She smiled at the anachronism and the audaciousness and said she would pay me back when she came from her class at ten. I smiled at the ridiculous assumption that she would ever see me again. She walked away in a hurry, her skirt slim in the sunlight and her step jaunty as only the young can affect. When she disappeared through the double glass doors I turned with some reluctance to my day.

        I picked up my text and notes and got to my classroom on time to begin on time. I fully enjoyed the lecture and then briefly saw a student after class about an assignment due in a few days. I thought that she had left her request a bit long but gave her the advice she wanted. When I was riding the elevator I remembered the young woman at the parking lot. I smiled to myself. Silly, a fifty-seven year old man with a growing bald spot as well as innumerable declinations from youth thinking about a twenty year old student this way with small excitations of the heart and lungs. What the hell, why not, I thought, put my books on my desk and went back down the elevator.

       I had not come even halfway across the lot toward my car when I noticed her standing there. She was leaning up against the trunk in a relaxed manner, reading.

       "What took you so long?" she asked, putting her book back in her purse. She smiled in a manner that told me she knew the surprise I was feeling and delighted in the fact that I had come and that I had found her there. She waited for a few seconds for me to compose myself and then announced that we should go for coffee somewhere. I agreed.  

       I said, "Why are we going for coffee?"

       She said, "Why shouldn't we?" She added, though, "It was kind of you to give me a quarter and I wish to be kind to you, too, do you understand?" I nodded my disagreement. I did not understand and I said so, but I did not say so, either. I said nothing, but pointed to my car. We got in and drove to Macdonald's. I bought my charge an ice-cream cone since it was still hot at the beginning of September. A vegetarian, she declined a burger. When we were half done our snack and had talked about this and that, she asked me if I had ever given a young girl a massage. I said with emphasis, "No! I have not!"

(to be continued)