Subject: Re: Back from the dead, or the living
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Sun Mar 19 2000 - 03:07:05 EST
Someone who played what might be called (& by no means
extravagantly) a crucial not to say climacteric role in
the desperate though so often gallantly even sunnily presented
lives of so many of us, from the achingly miniature old lady
selling muffins at the corner of our optimistically Frenchified
boulevard in downtown Ballyjamesduff to the most recent,
vociferous & less than half-heartedly welcomed addition to
the family of our philoprogenitive (but from reasons of piety
rather than carnal pleasure) gardener Pat Maguire, used to say,
smirking as he did so down that admittedly uncharismatic nose
of his, the one he drolly invited his disciples to term his questing
snout: 'Never lend books'. My cousin Prollicks or Bollicks
as he was known to his more dismissively affectionate intimates
& whose identity my raptor-eyed readers will have already guessed
- for he it is, indeed - had developed the pronouncement of
these breath-depriving dicta to a poetic form that was not so much
derived from but rather distilled & purified into what on
an effusive day you might say was a damned nearly celestial
version of the Persian four syllable kuku. 'Never lend books'
was one of Prollick's earliest, uttered - to the less than dumbfounded
surprise of Betsie his fourteen year old but already - & here
it is the only word - soignee mother - with the limpid,
somewhat effete enunciation of a Magdelen College don
of twenty months. Thus Bollicks: 'Never lend books';
adding with the understandable but still, in an infant not yet two,
slightly regrettable imperiousness: ' Buy & give but never lend' ....
Scottie B.
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