It's A Curse

It’s A Curse

          During our late-afternoon circumnavigation of Claudelands Park, my dog, whom I’d let off the lead, stopped to sniff Howdy with a medium-sized but low-slung hound of some sort who was on a lead. Noticing that he was somewhat behind me, I walked back to them. I commented to the hound’s person that I thought happy-looking dogs with mournful faces were cool.

          The person at the other end of the lead from the hound was a slender woman aged, I’d guess, somewhere between 35 and 50. She was in running shorts and shoes and an unmemorable long-sleeved top. She started going on about how lazy her dog was, first nagging her to go for a run and then holding back and making her drag her by the lead.

          I replied that my little fella has a Diploma in Dawdling, and we chatted on for a moment or two like that.

          She broke off from the dog chat and put some urgency into her voice. ‘Wait! Did you hear that?’

          I said, ‘Hear what?’

          The urgency stayed in her voice. ‘That sound!’ She put her hand on my arm. ‘It sounds like somebody screaming. Or crying. Hear it?’

          Anybody who thinks that having an attractive woman maybe 30 years younger than me put her hand on my arm had no more effect on my neural activity than picking up dog shit with an inside-out plastic bag has weird ideas about old people. I listened closely.

          I heard something. It sounded something like some kids playing.

          ‘It sounds like some kids playing,’ I said. She looked at me. Showing my open-mindedness, I added, ‘Either that or an axe murderer running amok.’

          She ignored my speculation. ‘Do you think it’s coming from someone under those trees?’

          About 40 or 50 metres up the path, where it bends off to the right toward the centre of the park, is a stand of huge old trees, with a bench under one of them. I know that bench well, although I no longer rest my arthritic spine there often, as people frequently leave snack rubbish on the ground in its general vicinity, and the little fella is a dedicated scavenger and chicken bones do him no good. The sky was grey and the autumn sun was low behind us.

          ‘I don’t know,’ I told her. ‘I can’t see into those shadows that well because of my cataracts.’

          She removed her hand from my bicep and took off jogging, with her dog on the lead trotting to keep up with her. She veered left to run alongside the park on the footpath by the road. I guessed that reminding her of the thirty-or-so year age gap between us had been a foolish thing to do. She definitely had runner’s legs.

          I moseyed through the big-tree grove, stopping every few metres whilst the little fella sniffed and otherwise dawdled. As I approached the fork in the path in the middle of the park I noticed that a group of youths were playing soccer football at the far eastern end of the greensward, on the other side of the double avenue of fast-growing 10-year-old trees, calling out to each other and generally sounding like some kids playing.

          I let out a sardonic laugh, and continued to smile sardonically and shake my head as we walked around the game on the path by the regenerated native bush, where it segues into Jubilee Park, thinking about what a curse it is to be right.

          The mother of my children had hated it. I think it was either one of the reasons she stopped loving me or just one of her prime justifications for having done so. A false friend who always thought I was somebody else used to laugh at me with her about it, and later told one of my daughters, when I wasn’t present, that the trouble with me is that I’m ‘always right’.

          I can’t help it. Sometimes it’s just luck, such as with the sound of children playing thing – although it did sound something like that to me – but I think mostly it’s because I avoid confidently asserting speculations as facts and make an effort to shut the fuck up when I’m truthfully in the dark. I also try to admit it right away when I see that I’m wrong, and cheerfully admit when I’m unsure, as with the axe murderer, something that most people don’t seem to remember. They only remember that, when challenged, I just about always turn out to be right.

          Oh, well.

          I wonder what the hound-runner would think.