Don, Ben, and Bob

I have to own the fact that I am quickly becoming a cliché; rickety hips and arthritic hot spots, misplaced words, grumpiness. I’m not that grumpy, despite what you’ve heard. Maybe because I’m past seventy, and the “double ditch” is in sight, I don’t care as much about much, and care about some things more. I don’t care, for instance that I don’t know what “double ditch” means literally, it’s an Irish metaphor, I think. You get the idea, shoveling involved.

Today, absolutely lovely Saturday, first day of fall, Deb and I are down at Charlie’s having blueberry smoothies, and a tall, somewhat stooped man walks up carrying a small, black, somewhat tattered case. There’s urgency in his manner. “Hey,” he says, “I just found this on the street corner. Do you know if it belongs to anyone here?” He puts the suitcase on a chair and proceeds to unfasten its snaps. “What do you think might be in here?”

“I hope it’s not a dead baby,” I say but really hoping it isn’t a bomb, as if somebody would leave a bomb in a little black suitcase on the corner of Bessie Street on a tranquil Saturday morning. He lifts the lid. Indeed there is a dead something in there, folded in three, with a big toothy grin on an encephalitic head.

Deb says, “You just found this?”

“No, it’s mine. Just a joke. This is Don. Don Oso.”

“Oso means bear in Spanish,” Deb says.

“No, one word. Donoso. It means idiot in Spanish. Me and Donoso, we’re a pair of idiots. I used to call him Charlie McCarthy but I got in trouble for that.” Deb, and I are of a vintage to know at least vaguely of Charlie McCarthy, whom the puppet unpleasantly resembles. Charlie’s doppelganger’s right hand man shuts the suitcase, doffs his fedora, and saunters off. Will he pull the same stunt down the street at Precita Park Cafe? The woman at the next table says, “That old man knows how to entertain himself.” What a perfect thing to be when you get to a certain age. A holy fool.

When I look it up later, I discover donoso means “witty, refined.” Is this another of the old man’s jokes? Or did he say “witty” and I misheard “idiot.” Tonight on page 286 of Middlemarch I find this sentence: The troublesome ones in a family are usually either the wits or the idiots. I have a vague idea that the universe is providing a clue here, but I’m too slow to pick up on it. I have been somewhat troublesome in the past. More likely I misremembered the word, the first syllable perhaps not being “don” but something similar. Ben, maybe. Oso, I know, was the last part. One of the neighborhood dogs bears the name. Ha ha.

I’m beginning to wonder if that man was an apparition, Borges manifesting through a time warp. He told us he was from South America, he didn’t say where.

Benoso means benificent.

I text Deb. What is the word for idiot we learned ?

Boboso.

The Buddhist sage says, “Only don’t know.” I am on the path.