I've been working on a series of short stories as of late and the following tale is just about where I want it to be.
So I thought it would be a Hoot if I posted it here in Various Matters for others to enjoy, or criticize.
It is my sincere hope that you, gentle reader, will find some reward for the time it will take you to read what follows, and, as always, feedback will be appreciated.
Keepers Of The Flame
I hadn’t seen Mary Pat McGuire in, what was it? Forty years?
The woman at whom I was gazing sat primly in a contoured plastic seat some thirty feet away from me in the overcrowded waiting area next to Gate 21-A in the of Miami International Airport.
The gate served as a pit stop for travelers bound for La Guardia, just outside of New York City, and for reasons which I will get into in a minute or so, the area was swelling, seemingly exponentially, with folks of all ages toting and dragging their back packs and carry-on luggage.
I was working my way through this mass of humanity, heading toward the next point of departure in the line, Gate 23-A, to present myself for my flight to Boston, when I noticed her.
This woman, who was a dead ringer for the Mary Pat McGuire I had known during my formative years growing up on Dublin Hill in New Britain, Connecticut, had her nose buried deeply into a book at the time. She was completely oblivious to a pair of overweight, anonymous neighbors.
Whatever she was reading, it was obvious that she was using the book as a personal form of people repellant.
Just as a point of reference about our mutual past: Mary Pat and the other McGuires lived about ten houses down from where my family lived on Clark Street, which ran smack through the center of Dublin Hill.
Clark Street extended about three-quarters-of-a-mile along the high eastern crest of the hill. Center Street, which used to be called the Old Hartford Mail Road, anchored the southern end. Center Street, at the time, housed the neighborhood’s bakeries, butcher shops, hardware stores and small groceries.
It seemed as though just about everyone on Dublin Hill carried modest credit accounts with these proprietors.
LaSalle Street, which was lined with two and three-family tenements almost identical to the clapboard house in which I was raised, intersected Clark at the northern end.
Here’s another reference point. Mary Pat and I were born two months apart – I in May and she in July, back in the late 1940s. Moms stayed at home in those days to raise the kids while Dads went off to work in the city’s major manufacturing plants.
Mary Pat and I, along with a few of the other toddlers, shared a play pen that one of our Moms set up in the front porch when the weather was right.
I seem to remember that we all spent a lot of time out there on those porches, enjoying late-afternoon, cool breezes. In my case, we lived on the second floor – my arthritic grandparents had taken over the first floor apartment to make their lives easier. That porch afforded a magnificent view of the Glastonbury Hills way off in the distance.
On clear days we could also make out the Hartford skyline to the North, dominated by the Travelers Insurance Co. tower.
As I remember it, thirty-three other kids were born within a year-and-a-half to families living on our street back then: twenty-one boys and twelve girls. All of us got to know each other well and we all got along, most of the time. To be sure, there were some occasional, testosterone-induced fist-fights between the boys. There weren’t too many of these instances, just enough to establish pecking orders.
I recalled that I had had a few minor go-rounds with Mike McMahon (they were more like wrestling matches than fist fights) and that neither one of us was any worse for the wear. Let it be said here and now that there were no dust-ups severe enough to cause permanent injuries to bodies or to emerging male egos. It was merely a case of boys-being-boys.
Let it also be stated for the record that the girls on Dublin Hill abhorred such acts: they never wavered, even for an instant, when it came down to ratting out the combatants.
In time, we all tromped off to St. Mary’s School, a brown brick edifice built directly behind the magnificent Portland Brownstone Church named for the Mother of Jesus which dominated the base of Dublin Hill at the far north end of Center and Main Streets.
Of the total number of kids who lived on Clark Street, Mary Pat and I, along with seven others, continued our formal education at St. Thomas Aquinas High School after the Sisters of Mercy at St. Mary’s had had enough of us.
The remaining twenty-one among us went off to New Britain Senior High.
Amazingly, we continued to remain fairly close and civil to one another throughout our high school years despite of, and sometimes in face of, the reality that we were all gradually finding new interests and making new friends.
Anyway, enough of that.
As I mentioned earlier, the terminal was becoming an increasingly large snaggle of people with luggage who were arriving for their flights with nowhere to go.
In good, orderly time, all of us should have been five miles up in the air and settled in our way back to Boston or wherever, returning home from whatever brought us to Miami or to other points in the Southeast in the first place.
But the entire Northeast had been placed under a winter storm warning. We were hunkered down, as they like to say in these parts, while a massive weather system known as a Nor’Easter speeded its way up the mid-Atlantic coast. So we became pilgrims stranded on an impersonal oasis, jammed into the waiting areas to endure delay or, in the worst case, outright cancellation a thousand miles from our homes or places of business.
To amuse myself in such situations, I perfected a trivial habit. It involved people-watching and I consider it an adjunct to my somewhat intensive observations and ongoing reflections about basic concepts of human nature.
I freely and openly confess that I love to watch perfect strangers navigate through the passageways of their lives in full public view.
Silly?
Perhaps.
Anyway, I was engaged in this trivial pursuit, observing a twenty-something as she elbowed her way toward the gate, when I initially noticed Mary Pat sitting there, with her book. She was obviously oblivious to an older couple right across from her, fighting like a pair of lions at a gnu carcass over sections of a left-behind edition of the Miami Herald.
Mary Pat --if indeed she was Mary Pat: I wasn’t one hundred percent sure yet -- was dressed casually like dozens of other women travelers, in comfortable Nikes and a stylish Gor-Tex running suit that appeared to be the color of mauve under the sterile parabolic lighting system that permeated through the waiting lounge.
What made her more recognizable to me, however, were her high cheek bones and her distinctive, dense set of eye brows that, plainly visible even now, seemed to be connected in one, long brush running just above the bridge of her thin, rectangular nose.
What books did she devour back then?, I labored to recall. Was it the Nancy Drew series?
The mandatory school Classics?
It really made no difference, because the Mary Pat I remembered devoured just about anything she could get her hands upon. I think that she was the first kid from the neighborhood to get a library card.
But Mary Pat McGuire was not just a book worm. In testament to a pair of older brothers and to her father, who I recall played some city industrial league baseball, Mary Pat possessed pretty good talent and an appreciation for sports.
Later on, at Aquinas High, she went on to earn letters in tennis and in cheerleading.
It also never occurred to me over all of the intervening years but, in a flash, I recalled that Mary Pat was blessed with the longest set of legs I had ever seen below a woman’s torso. Those legs gave Mary Pat the ability and stamina to hold her own during the stick ball games we played on the street back in the old neighborhood and on the clay tennis courts at Walnut Hill Park.
They also elevated her to a good half-foot over the other Clark Street girls. And by the time Mary Pat reached her sixteenth year, her legs, elongated and strengthened by many hours of running back and forth on the tennis court, extended to her a presence and carriage of a quality that somewhat reminded me of the late great Kate Hepburn.
Indeed, she would have been quite a catch back then.
But that was back then, as they say.
For reasons that seem quaintly, old-fashioned Irish by modern standards, there was an unwritten axiom in the Dublin Hill neighborhood: teens were not to date seriously until they had moved on and had made something of their lives.
Enigmatically, there was a corollary to this axiom: girls from Dublin Hill could be seen in full public view with neighborhood boys at infrequent formal occasions, such as school dances and the occasional prom, but invariably they were under the direct supervision of their parents or other relatives. Back in those times, Old World Customs & Habits ruled the day.
As for me, and probably through the influence of our mothers, I got lucky once. I got to accompany Mary Pat to our senior prom. I got up the nerve to ask her to go with me and, to my delight and total surprise, Mary Pat said yes.
Let me tell you, Mary Pat was a pure vision when she was dolled up in her chiffon-yellow, empire gown. It was also the first time that I had seen her wearing her long, auburn hair done up and back in a French Twist, accented by fresh daisies. I also relished the fact that she was just about as tall as I was when she wore her four-inch high pumps.
As they say, that was then.
Now, sitting in the terminal, oblivious to all that surrounded her and with her legs crossed at the knees cradling her book, she still exhibited the prime assets of a well-trained athlete, jazz dancer or a fashion model.
It would be quite silly to infer that I assumed Mary Pat hadn’t changed much over the years.
In fact, she changed quite a bit. But in a very graceful way. As if to add a touch of maturity to her already stellar cheek bones and elongated neckline, Mary Pat’s face seemed just a tad fuller. Her hair style was also much shorter and trimmer than what I recalled about her when wore it, more often than not, in a basic Pony Tail back in those days.
It also seemed that she had a salon tint added to her hair, perhaps to cover some gray strands or to make a youthful stylish statement.
Anyway, as these memories resurrected in my mind, Mary Pat continued to block out the masses that grew geometrically around her, locked into the book she was reading. I decided to approach her after a quick stroll over to the electronic board set in the middle of the concourse, to check out the obvious – I would be delayed in Miami for some unspecified period of time.
All departures to the Northeast flashed pessimistic news --“DELAYED” -- in blazing magenta.
As I began my approach in her direction, I was gripped with a bout of momentary insecurity: if, indeed, this was she, would Mary Pat recognize me after all of these years?
Had she intellectually and emotionally moved on to the point in her own life where our formative years no longer mattered, like a distant blur in the rear-view mirror?
Worst of all, was I actually about to approach a complete stranger who resembled the Mary Pat McGuire I used to know, but who knew absolutely nothing about me or she, and/or who could care less?
Before I knew it, I was standing by her. I addressed her by name, in a soft voice of casual inquiry rather than by making a direct assertion as to whom I thought she was.
I am such a worry-wart.
Of course she was Mary Pat. She set her left thumb down between the pages she was reading, closed the book, and then glanced upward and over the oval lenses of her tortoise shell.
And she smiled. My God. Jimmy Dougherty. What a surprise!
She closed her book, stood up, and we exchanged a polite yet rather warm hug. We then moved on to dispense with a few pro-forma matters.
I said that I was heading back to Boston after concluding a round of client consultations.
About what, she inquired.
I said that I represented several companies which hired me to give them advice about environmental regulations.
How did I get involved in that line of work, she asked.
I answered that I had worked in Washington, DC for a United States Senator years ago and I had a golden opportunity to get involved in drafting environmental legislation on the ground floor.
What about you, I asked.
She said that she taught English Literature and Journalism at the University of Miami. With Spring Break, she was off to New York City to visit with a few old colleagues who taught with her back in the 1980s at NYU.
When she had had her full of the city, she planned to drive up to West Hartford to spend a few days with her father.
Mary Pat mentioned that her dad, who was now in his late-90s, had moved away from Dublin Hill in 1989 and resided in a retirement community built on the campus of Mount Saint Joseph’s College.
Married?, I asked.
Twice, she said.
Her second marriage was going on fourteen years with a man named Paul McGonagle, whom she had met on the Miami campus. He was several years older than she … and no, she volunteered, they didn’t have any children. She also volunteered that her husband wasn’t in-tow for the trip to New York: he loathed Manhattan and, months prior, he and a few of his buddies booked a fishing trip in the Keys.
What about you, she inquired.
I was an orphan. Mother was taken out by the cancer back in the early 1990s and my father passed about nine years later. Heart disease.
My older brother, Matt, taught school in Berlin until he was killed when his car skidded off the road and he wrecked on a very rainy night back in 1977. He left a widow and a pair of sons but they all turned out all right after all their months of grieving mercifully ended.
Mary Pat, somberly, said she remembered something about that.
My younger brother, Mike, started and later sold a software development company in a transaction that turned him a millionaire. But the windfall didn’t turn Mike into a jerk, fortunately. He bought a nice house near the water in Wellfleet and invested in a condo in Aruba, where his door remained open to family and friends at any hour of the day.
Tell me about your wife, she inquired.
I said had been living with Liz for the past thirty-nine years. Liz nee Cronin – no relation to the Cronin Family who lived down the street: Liz was from Worcester.
We tied the knot in Washington, DC … she was working on the House Side of the Hill at the time … after she finished grad school in Michigan ... four grown children, three sons and one daughter… six grandchildren and counting.
I mentioned Liz did a fair amount of her own consulting work, specializing in employment benefits and labor relations. We lived in a restored, winterized cottage in the Village of Hull, right on the southern fringe of Boston overlooking both the islands within Boston Harbor, Fort Winthrop, and the city’s exquisite skyline.
An airport announcement interrupted the opening rounds of our little catching-up session almost in mid-sentence. We were collectively informed that all out-bound flights to the Northeast Corridor were being delayed for a minimum of two hours.
I recalled there was a Chili’s chain outlet close by the gates, so I suggested that we kill some time, wait out the weather system, and get ourselves caught up over a pile of nachos and couple of adult beverages. Mary Pat took to this idea like a duck takes to water.
She bookmarked the page she was reading –- it turned out to be one of Mary Higgins Clark’s works -- closed the volume, and inserted it into her black saddle bag purse. For the first time, I noticed that her purse was her only carry-on. She had checked in all of her other baggage in for her flight with the Skycap at the terminal curb. My sole tote was my lap top, which dangled over my shoulder in its carry-case.
Mary Pat and I were not the only ones in the terminal who had a notion to wait out the delay in Chili’s. From our vantage point by the glass door on the concourse, we could tell that the bar and the restaurant were jam-packed with fellow pilgrims who in much need of food and drink.
As it turned out in our favor, two high-back chairs were vacant at the near end of the bar. Just about everybody else in the establishment sought out seating near the big glass panes overlooking the jets – and this seemed to be senseless since none of the planes, parked out on the tarmac, were going anywhere right about then.
After Mary Pat and I claimed our turf, we ordered a mound of yellow-corn tortilla chips piled high with steaming cheese, beans, jalapeño peppers and salsa. She opted for a bottle of Dos Equis dark, served with a wedge of lime. I settled for a twenty-four ounce tankard of Samuel Adams ale.
With finger food and fluid at-hand, Mary Pat and I spent the next hour or so relating, by and in turn, all of those amusing and anecdotal tales that tend to flesh out the patina of time.
Mary Pat seemed to recall that I had been drafted into the Army after I graduated from Georgetown but I corrected her on that account. I mentioned that I was blessed with one of the highest numbers that came up in the 1967 Draft Lottery – my date of birth corresponded with Number 344 – so I was subsequently spared from all of that Vietnam stuff.
I said I didn’t think too much of that war. President Johnson lied through his teeth to get us all-in to the combat over there and, despite my high draft number, I volunteered to help Bobby Kennedy campaign for the White House on his proffer that he would bring the war to an end and bring the troops home.
I was delighted to hear that Mary Pat actively volunteered for Bobby’s campaign, too. She spent the month of May, during her sophomore year at NYU, canvassing door-to-door for him in Upstate New York.
Mary Pat and I shared sad memories of the night Bobby was gunned down in Los Angeles. But we agreed that our involvement with his campaign molded our politics. She seemed to exude the same, upbeat optimism she had cultivated during our years at Aquinas.
As for me, I admitted that I had become a tad more jaded about my expectations. I blamed this on my stint working in the Senate.
We also remembered that Terry Quinn was the only one from the old neighborhood who died in Vietnam. Another Dublin Hill kid named Bobby Kelley, who was a few years younger than we were, lost his legs to a land mine or to a booby trap over there, she said.
I didn’t know that. My parents had moved on to Newington by the time Bobby Kelley had enlisted in the Marine Corps, and I had been enrolled at Georgetown.
Mary Pat lived at home while she studied at Central Connecticut State for a while, so she therefore brought me up-to-date by adding that Bobby was never really quite the same after he returned to the old neighborhood in 1968.
Last she heard, Bobby Kelley had moved on to parts unknown.
I recalled that Mary Pat had indeed attended the sprawling university located about two miles away from our homes on Dublin Hill. But she said that she transferred to New York University after her freshman year, to sweeten her prospects of finding work in the publishing business. After graduation, she worked a stint copy-editing with one of the major publishing houses in Manhattan. She also continued her studies at NYU for a couple of years, earning her Masters Degree in English and Irish Literature.
Mary Pat confessed she eventually became disillusioned with everything about Manhattan. Maybe she should have taken an advance degree in business studies or in marketing, she mused.
But to have done so would have compromised her real interests, which really amounted to her having a love affair with great works of literature. Truth be known, Mary Pat had hoped to discover the next Faulkner or Hemingway of our generation: but that was not to be.
Instead, Mary Pat witnessed the cutthroat corporate changes taking place in publishing during the last few months of her work in the big city on the Hudson. Starting in the mid-1970s, she said, too much emphasis began to be placed on marketing and residuals, like TV or movie rights.
And then, there was all of that blatant pandering to Manhattan’s literary elites and their bratty poseurs. All of this added up to taking away all the fun, she said.
So she got into teaching at NYU as a graduate assistant, showing underclassmen how to write, correcting their term essays and papers and, later, executing research assignments for tenured professors.
Next, she spent a couple of years as a junior member of the faculty at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. This time, she taught a six-credit course on the modern British novel. She also commenced work towards her doctorate in literature.
In less than a year, however, Mary Pat moved on to Duke, where she continued teaching while she wrapped up her dissertation.
Then it was on to Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. The interdepartmental politics, and the in-fighting, ruined everything.
So Mary Pat went back to Connecticut to accept an adjunct position at Mount Saint Mary’s just at the time the college administration decided to convert the old nursing school into an assisted living facility.
It was then and there that she met her first husband – she didn’t mention his name -- just adding that he grew up in New Haven. Whoever her first husband was, he studied law at UCONN just down the street. They married after he had passed his bar exam but their relationship lasted less than two years, she said with no regrets.
After the divorce, Mary Pat spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out whether or not she should travel over to Ireland, or to England, and seek out a teaching position at one of the great universities over there.
As her fortune would have it, the University of Miami posted a mid-level faculty opening within its English Department. The excitement of living and working in a city of Miami’s caliber and the opportunity to live in a place where the temperature rarely sunk below sixty degrees appealed to her.
So Mary Pat applied for the position. She hit a grand slam at the oral interview, and clinched her gig at a pretty interesting school.
And now, she was off to Manhattan to bop around with old friends, take in a Broadway show, and then drive to West Hartford to spend some quality time with her dad.
It took me substantially less time to bring Mary Pat up to speed regarding the details surrounding the personalities and the events that shaped my life.
I learned early- on that most people don’t really get the nature of my chosen profession, so I told her as succinctly and as vaguely as I could that I started the consulting business after I had left the Senate, and that I now had a nice batch of paying clients.
I wanted to leave her with the impression that I was some kind of plain-vanilla road warrior-salesman.
I didn’t have it in me to inform Mary Pat that I had spent more than nearly thirty years building a business in governmental relations, advising clients on how to squeeze the loopholes in environmental regulations.
I also didn’t tell Mary Pat that I did a fair amount of political fundraising as an adjunct to my core business. I figured these were details that May Pat undoubtedly would find offensive.
After all, I assumed, Mary Pat -- Bobby Kennedy worshipper and English Department Academic Liberal -- probably would have held the cut-throating dweebs in the publishing houses in higher esteem than I, the lobbyist, who just happened to be sitting next to her on a bar stool.
Right about then, a public announcement interrupted our conversation. The gist was: the storm was passing quickly through the New York metro area and that boarding for flights up there would commence within the hour.
I glanced up at the TV screen that hung above the bar, one that happened to be dialed into CNN, and it confirmed, via weather graphic that the storm had gathered momentum and was racing out into the open Atlantic Ocean just south of Long Island. We had finished our first round of beers, so I asked Mary Pat if she could handle another Dos Equis.
She accepted the offer. Another brew would ensure that she would take a good nap during the flight to LaGuardia, Mary Pat said.
Mary Pat reached into her black, leather shoulder bag and searched for her credit card to pay off the bar keep. But this was a gesture which I immediately rejected: I insisted that I pay. She thanked me graciously and, as she juggled her bag in her lap.
Just before snapping it shut, I noticed that there was a second book inside of it, next to the Clark saga.
A diagonal strip of large type, in scarlet, proclaimed the book was a publisher’s proof. A line right under the title also proclaimed that the book was a critical re-examination and reassessment of the literary works of Joseph Conrad.
The author: Mary Patricia McGuire-McGonagle, PhD.
I asked Mary Pat if she would allow me to take a quick peek at her work. Front to back, it was two hundred and fifty seven pages. Mary Pat told me that she was taking it up North, to give it a final go-over for typesetters’ mistakes.
I told her, with a good dose of pride in my voice, that I was very much impressed to be sharing a couple of drinks and a plate of nachos with a famous author.
I wouldn’t quite put it like that, she said. The book would probably not get too much recognition beyond the academic community. But she hoped it would make its way into university libraries and onto a mid-level English course syllabus here and there. The University of Miami Press was going to publish it by the end of the year.
Mary Pat demurred that she was just about one hundred percent certain that her book would never, ever, be optioned for a movie. Don’t be too sure about that, I said in a supportive and somewhat patronizing tone: one really never knows what’s going to come out of Hollywood these days.
Stranger things have happened, I assured her. Hawking’s classic about black holes and the universe, “A Brief History of Time,” made it to the screen. If his work about astrophysics and cosmology (could there ever possibly drier toast that those themes?)created movie possibilities in the mind of a screenwriter or a director, anything was possible.
We sensed that our brief encounter would soon come to an end, so Mary Pat and I began to reminisce about the old days back on Dublin Hill. Did I remember anything about the Beatty Twins, Tom and John, the ruddy and acne-faced altar boys who went on to be ordained in the priesthood?
I knew John had joined the Jesuits. He taught a couple of religion courses at Georgetown after I had graduated. Tom Beatty hooked up with an obscure, Irish order which ran a string of parochial schools in Maryland and in Delaware. The third Beatty, Mary Faith, I added, eventually became a registered nurse wearing the habit of the Daughters of the Holy Cross.
Mary Pat said she kept in periodic touch with Margaret Mary Toomey. Did I remember her?
Of course, I said. Peg was the somewhat gawky, freckle-faced kid with the carrot-top pony tail whose folks must have spent a small fortune on her piano lessons.
I remembered that Mary Pat and Peg were best friends on Clark Street. According to Mary Pat, Peg went to law school at Boston College, a fact I found very interesting since the law school is located in Chestnut Hill or about five miles, as the crow files, from my place in Hull.
She was an associate justice sitting on the Massachusetts Supreme Court, Mary Pat informed me.
I should have known that, I said somewhat sheepishly.
Mary Pat was proud of the fact that Justice Margaret Mary Ashton, nee Toomey, was the driving legal force behind the Massachusetts Supreme Court opinion granting civil unions to gay couples in the Bay State.
I always thought that Peg was the brightest one among us, in her own quiet and studious way.
What could I say? I was impressed.
What about your cousin Greg Dougherty, Mary Pat inquired. She had an adolescent crush on Greg – as did most of the neighborhood girls – because the lad was tall, handsome, courteous, and athletically trim.
I said Greg followed his dad, my Uncle Dan on my father’s side, into the New Britain Fire Department after he had graduated from Quinnipiac College.
Greg retired with the rank of captain a few years ago and now lived outside of Nashua, New Hampshire. I also heard, through what was left of the old family grape vine, that Greg lectured fire academy trainees about safety, that is, whenever he wanted to make some extra cash.
I had to laugh when Mary Pat brought up the Quinn Family name.
Five generations of Quinn lived under the same roof, a half a block down the hill from where I lived. They had the big vacant lot just south of their place and we could never figure out why they never built another house on it.
Old Man Seamus Quinn, the grandfather known as Jim, had planted several cherry trees on the property long before either Mary Pat or I was born. By the time I reached my twelfth year, as I recall, all those cherry trees stood about sixteen feet tall, with boughs sagging with sweet globes of fruit by mid-summer.
I was one of the neighborhood kids who used to sneak onto the Quinn lot and shinny up into the trees to swipe fruit by the bagful.
One day, Old Man Quinn caught Brian O’Rossa red-handed in a tree while the rest of us scrammed out of his lot.
The old man wielded a long-handled broomstick as he ran us off.
But Brian got trapped on a low-hanging limb and the old man literally beat Brian off his perch with that broomstick.
Of course, Brian fell awkwardly. And he screamed when his ankle bone snapped just as he hit the ground.
Old Man Quinn stopped pummeling Brian with the stick when he realized that the lad was hurt.
Everyone in the neighborhood understood that Old man Quinn felt terrible about beating the kid out of his tree.
But on the other hand, everyone figured Brian got what he deserved.
Brian ended up in a cast on his leg for the summer and we lads didn’t swipe any more cherries from Old Man Quinn after that.
Could one imagine the law suit the O’Rossa Clan would have filed on Brian’s behalf against Old Man Quinn if the cherry tree incident had taken place today?, I observed.
Different times, Mary Pat smiled. Yet for any number of reasons, Brian’s broken ankle being Exhibit A, the neighborhood and its old-fashioned ways kept most of us on a fairly even keel.
Ah, yes! The old neighborhood!, I said.
Mary Pat then went on to relate a passage from one of Joseph Conrad’s novellas.
In “Heart of Darkness,” she said, the main character loved to watch English ships departing the mouth of the Thames, heading for destinations halfway around the globe.
Those ships, she quoted from Conrad, carried messengers who attested to the might of the Empire, like bearers of sparks from a sacred fire.
After thinking for a second about what Mary Pat had said, I guess, anyone who grew up in any neighborhood, anywhere -- and who carried their community’s values and culture off to faraway places -- was a keeper of some flame.
Mary Pat went much further: did I ever give any thought, she asked, to the possibility that such a flame might have been lit by striking a piece of flint with steel to a swath of cloth?
The way she had it figured out, there were actually four metaphorical elements at-play in the creation of the illusionary flame: the flint, the steel, the cloth to snag the spark, and, finally, the spark itself.
The metaphor, I said with some embarrassment, would have to be examined by a person with a pay grade much higher than mine.
An English professor carried some advantages in the modern world, she laughed.
At the very least, she added, they’re entitled to examine such matters.
Mary Pat said that she would be happy to send me an autographed copy of her book after it had been published.
How could I possibly turn her down?
So I gave her my business card and added I would be only too happy to check out her thesis about Conrad -- or whatever else she wrote about the author’s pursuit of literary excellence.
Keep in-mind that Conrad was a Pole, she noted. He refreshed the English language.
Just then, and on that note, an announcement rang throughout the terminal. The flight to LaGuardia was now ready for boarding.
We agreed that we would do our best to stay in touch, and that we’d also look each other up if and when I was in Miami the next time or she found herself in Boston.
With that, I accompanied Mary Pat McGuire to her gate and we exchanged hugs and best wishes.
I told her how glad I was to have met her again, after all the years. For an hour, it seemed that we had been transported, as if by a time machine, back to the old neighborhood and that our conversation resurrected images of personalities and events to which I had given no thought for years.
So we hugged once again and said our good-byes.
Mary Pat joined the boarding line. I receded ten yards into the concourse and watched her move along.
In less than a minute, Mary Pat presented her boarding pass to a flight attendant. She glanced back to me and smiled as she walked through the gangway door and then she was gone.
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