L is for Legs

When I was three feet shorter and three times wiser, I always hid under tables at family gatherings, weddings and my parents’ dinner parties. I was a ninja and that’s what ninjas do. It’s also what my old cat did and if it was good enough for Spiral, it was good enough for me. Slipping down beneath the table, the world became a forest of legs – both human and wooden – where Spiral and I would listen to adult conversations we couldn’t comprehend. We were useless spies really.

K is for Keira

 

Sometimes, I find myself thinking about friendship, about what it is and how it even happens and it begins to seem so strange. It’s like when you say a word over and over until it loses meaning and you’re left with this sound in your mouth that you can’t really understand. I mean, here are these people, that I’ve met at different points in my life and in different ways and even though I didn’t really know them, there was something about them I found attractive. I don’t mean attractive in a physical sense – although I have remarkably beautiful friends – but in the sense that there was something in their personalities that drew me in and made me want to spend more time with them. Some of my closest friends come from my school days and I can’t even remember how I became friends with them. It just feels like they were always there. With certain people, I can remember in a narrative sense how we know each other – the connections that led to our friendship forming. But I can’t remember how those friendships formed; that moment when the person went from being someone of whose existence I was aware to someone who’s existence matters to me on such an emotional level it’s almost scary.

Most of my closest friends have been my friends for the best part of a decade. And then there’s Keira, who came out of nowhere.

J is for Jehovah’s Witnesses

“No thanks, I have no interest in any of that,” you say, bashfully, and close the door. You return to your lunch and immediately ask yourself why you didn’t engage them in conversation. One of those intellectually engaging conversations – or maybe the proper word is debate, perhaps even argument – that go round and round and persuade no one to change their minds. Taking a bite of soup-dipped toast, you tell yourself you’re secure enough in your atheism that they’d never have managed to sway you. You would have failed to even dent their fervent belief too, no doubt. Then what would have been the point? Is life not too short to run around in circles like that?

Blowing on a spoonful of soup, you think about their strange sales pitch. The woman – Polish maybe, in her thirties but dressed like she’s in her sixties – held up a copy of their magazine, Watchtower, and asked you to consider an article she was pointing to. Something about God. You weren’t really paying attention; you were distracted by the strangeness of the action. What if you went from door to door with a copy of the Irish TImes, asking people to consider some random article you pointed at? They’d have been as quick closing the door on you as you had been closing the door on those two. The other Witness – a man, in his forties, with a luxuriously bushy mustache - stood to one side, just nodding his head. What he was nodding at, you can’t guess. For a moment, you hope you didn’t offend them by cutting them off so quickly and closing the door. They’d only have been wasting their own time as much as yours, you reason. Anyway, they’re used to that, it’s part of the deal, it’s the challenge of going to these strangers houses and trying to ‘save’ them.