Time, My Daughter the Witch & the Inevitability of Drinking

Two people asked me for the time tonight. The first one was hurrying on his skateboard and he shouted back over his shoulder, "Do you know what time it is?" It was 5:20 and this was not good news to the skater, who redoubled his efforts with a howl of despair and sped away. (wow, that's really terrible writing. Go me!) The second was at the bar (I was at the bar too, that comes later) and when I told him it was 6:00 he was very happy and relaxed into his beer with an audible sigh of "god, I'm where I'm supposed to be when I'm supposed to be there." All of which led me to tell him how he was the second person who had asked me for the time and how different their reactions had been. Which nobody else is interested in, I guess, except me, but I think, it speaks odd volumes about our relationship with time.

My daughter is a witch. This is no big surprise, she comes from two families with a long and proud history of witchcraft and odd psychic phenomena, but I guess I didn't expect her to take to it so easily and so well. She reads palms and does them well. She read my friend J's tonight at the bar and found a long ago secret - well - what do you expect, really? J sniffled a little, we turned our heads politely and then hugged her. Poor J - there you have it, A is a witch.

I had no intention of going to the bar tonight or of drinking at all. I went to the laundromat & the library & I was going to settle in by the whir of the dryers with a Charles de Lint novel but then J called me and said, I'll meet you at the pub, I'm buying and somehow, as always, that turned into multiple pitchers of PBR. I'm not sure how exactly this kind of thing happens.

But I guess, thank the gods, it does.