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On the shelf above the fireplace in the living room is a propped up postcard of Lisbon.
What it says on the back isn’t interesting at all.
But the picture is fascinating. If you look deeply into the artistic black and white shot, you can see all sorts of things. And what you see seems to change with what you feel, which is even more interesting.
Brian and Judy often argued about the content of the postcard.
They argued about when they thought the photograph was taken.
Judy was strongly reminded of the work of Henri Cartier Bresson. Brian thought whoever had taken the photo, much more recently, had been a fan as well.
They argued about the backstory of the people you could just make out, even though you couldn’t see their faces.
“Their body language makes it obvious,” Brian would say.
“Obviously not to you,” Judy would retort.
Exactly what was the man with the dog on the chain doing? It was very difficult to tell. And why was the woman leaning out of the second story window?
“Everyone has problems and issues,” said Judy. She thought it was fascinating that the postcard sort of captured a moment of time that crystalised some of those dilemmas. It didn’t judge, it just recorded them.
Some newly-wed friends of theirs had simply decided that everyone you could see was in love with someone else in the picture. But Brian and Judy didn’t buy that at all and dismissed that evaluation as far too coy.
For instance, there was a child looking as though he or she was lost, or waiting for someone. Standing there, alone with a ball under his or her arm.
You had to ask who, why and a whole raft of other questions.
Or did you?
Brian was beginning to think the whole thing was a little self-indulgent.
“Who’ll ever know,” he said.
Perhaps they had too much time on their hands and not enough to do if they could spend all this energy on a postcard of Lisbon.
One day they took it to lunch with them at a café. Across the antipasto platter, things got a little heated. “This is ridiculous,” said Brian. “It’s a postcard and it’s starting to control our lives and our conversations. Why aren’t we talking about us?”
“Don’t be silly,” said Judy. “It’s just fun. It’s a topic of conversation,” she paused, “…and we don’t seem to have many of those any more.”
“Maybe I should just take my coffee to another table,” hissed Brian, and did.
Then Judy put her hand to her mouth and gasped.
She had never really seen the two people sitting alone at separate tables outside the Lisbon café before.
Ross had been a very successful advertising creative until a freak snowboarding accident left him blind. Not certain what to do for a living any longer, he hit upon the idea of trading upon both his previous, award-winning career and his recent misfortune.
With the help of his young french wife Yvonne, he became the world’s first blind colour consultant.
To the chagrin of industry professionals everywhere, and as the result of some masterful self promotion, he would visit the ostentatious homes of wealthy matriarchs and the pretentious palaces of the new rich. Yvonne would describe the room using the full depth of her beautiful accent, as Ross would gush enthusiastically. One rich widow doubled his already hefty fee when, as Yvonne described the sunlight streaming through the series of french doors, Ross vowed he could ‘see’ it in his fertile mind via the tingling of warmth on his face and promptly described lashings of the palest lime green for the walls with aubergine trim. It was apparently a colour her lost husband would have loved. Then his assistants strode in and detailed the exact plan in its precise detail.
But not everyone was convinced. Some of his colour combinations were proof, said his harshest critics, that he really was blind.
So a challenge was suggested on national television, because, by now, he had had a feature article in virtually every home decorating magazine on the planet and everyone knew who he was.
Ross would be given challenges on air, would respond with his recommendations and the results would be evaluated by a panel of experts and celebrities.
Unfortunately, things did not go well.
Without an actual room, Ross felt no attachment to the space and floundered with pedestrian replies. When in a kitchen with actual benches laden with ripening fruit and the familiar smells of home cooking, he lept to suggest cinnamon coffee coloured walls and whipped cream cupboards. But in a cold television studio he was lost at the mere description of an imagined space and a theoretical task.
The panel crucified him. The public vilified him. He was shunned.
Then, as he was out walking alone, tapping his white stick on the paving stone pavement, wondering what to do next, his cellphone rang.
Unfortunately, he answered it.
It was a tabloid reporter asking what his colour predictions for the next year would be.
“The soft yellow of a whispered lie,” he started, “ with the indulgent shade of a martini olive,” he continued, “ a fuck you pink and horseshit brown,” he yelled.
Then with a series of undefinable noises, the phone went dead.
Intrigued, the reporter held on the line.
Soon a new voice was on the other end asking who the reporter was, who the conversation had been with and…
It seems Ross, in his passion to express himself, had walked under a bus.
His final words were splashed across the newspaper pages and television screens like some kind of prophecy. His widow cried how the media had driven him to his death. Then she, or someone using her name, quickly wrote a book about it. And another lavishly illustrated volume about his favourite colours and best projects followed.
All his critics became even more silent than Ross was in his expensive cemetery mausoleum, because none of them wanted to be the first to be overly critical of the dead and the pendulum of fame had swung very much back in Ross’s direction.
And because nobody knew for sure how to take those final statements, and no-one was sure whether they wanted to be a décor innovator, an eager follower or a rebel going against the trend, whichever and whatever that trend was, the blind colour consultant’s predictions were proven correct.
In all the best places, people proved just how interesting and fashionable the soft yellow of a whispered lie, the indulgent shade of a martini olive, a fuck you pink and horseshit brown could be.
Peter was walking through the park, thinking about all the issues in his life. There were plenty of them and they were weighing on his mind.
The sun shone through the trees with a dappled frenzy.
Suddenly he stopped and looked down at the stone path. There, in front of him, was a crisp $50 bill. It was just sitting on the gravel, perfectly positioned where his next step would be, right in his way.
Peter’s first reaction was to look for the hidden film crew, the reporters doing the story on greed in modern society, the candid camera expose.
How would he react?
But it was in the middle of a park and there were only trees and flowers.
Yet he still thought it all the same. And he couldn’t quite get the thought of being watched out of his mind. If it wasn’t a camera crew, maybe it was God that was looking.
Was this some type of test?
So Peter sat down and looked at the $50 bill. It was a lot of money. To some little old lady on a pension, some welfare beneficiary, some family of four, some struggling solo mother, it would be a fortune.
He thought how devastated they would be if they’d lost it. How it would impact on their lives, how children could go hungry, how the little old lady could go cold because she couldn’t pay the heating bill.
So he sat there and looked at it. Should he pick it up and call it his own? Should he leave it there? But would someone else just pick it up and take it? Should he try to find out who owned it, or used to own it? And how would he do that?
Then Peter got a little angry.
He didn’t need this stress. Just by being there the $50 had posed him life issues.
He had enough already.
What was he to do?
The park was quiet. He was all alone.
The $50 bill sat there, inviting a response.
Whatever he did or didn’t do would be doing something.
Then Peter stood up, put the bill in his pocket and walked off.
He didn’t know whether he felt comfortable or not doing that.
Then he had an idea.
That night he put the bank note into an envelope and addressed it.
Through no deliberate decision it stayed in his jacket pocket for a week.
There were many times he contemplated using that $50 for lunch or something he needed to buy, but he didn’t.
Then one day he posted it and the Foundation for the Blind were $50 better off.
Margaret had always been a cat person. But while she was married to Fred, for all twenty eight years of their marriage, she never kept cats because he had an allergy to them.
So when Fred died of a heart attack, not wanting to replace him with another love, Margaret got a cat – and named it Fred. Fred was a great cat and great company. But as the years passed, other gentlemen of a certain age noticed that Margaret was quite good company herself. First there was Oscar. He was a flirt, he was charming and he took Maggie to the movies and to dinner and made her feel special.
Margaret worried that Fred was spending a lot of time alone, when he’d been her constant cat companion during the hard times. He often just sat and looked out from the windowsill, waiting for her. So she went to the pet store and got a kitten. Oscar suggested she name it after him and, being polite, Margaret agreed. But deep down Margaret wasn’t sure that Oscar, the ladies man not the cat, was quite the ladies man he made himself out to be and after a lot of dillying but not much dallying their relationship sort of faded away.
On the other hand, Oscar the cat snuggled into her at every opportunity.
She had also been noticing Jonathon, the widower of an acquaintance of hers from some years ago. And he’d been noticing her. They had afternoon tea together and went for walks.
When a stray cat adopted Margaret and nestled into the old chair in the kitchen alongside Fred and Oscar, they laughingly nicknamed it Jonathon. But she didn’t know whether Jonathon, the person, was as much at home with her as Jonathon, the cat.
However she was much more certain of Mitch.
Mitch was the type of permanently tanned Californian who never told anyone his age and never stopped doing. He loved life, decided he loved Margaret and went whole hog at everything.
But he didn’t like to be one-upped by anything.
Within a month, he gave Margaret another kitten, funnily enough called Mitch. Not that Margaret minded. She always said that cats were so much easier to keep than dogs and they all played so nicely together. Although Jonathon the cat and Mitch the cat didn’t seem all that fond of each other, funnily enough.
But it turned out Mitch, the person, didn’t stay around long, simply because Margaret couldn’t keep up with him and didn’t want to live life at breakneck speed any more. “Who needs to be as active as a teenager,” she said. By now, Mitch was off doing something else adventurous and exciting.
That’s when Jonathon came calling again with a bunch of old fashioned violets. It won Margaret’s heart.
Everything was nice. It wasn’t special. It wasn’t thrilling. But it was nice, in the good oldfashioned meaning of the word.
But one day Jonathon came around and saw a new kitten sitting on the sofa. He looked and saw a nametag that said Max.
Jonathon took a blood pressure pill, constructed a brief note to Margaret, collected up a few personal things and left.
When Margaret slumped through the door with a heavy bag of cat food, she saw the note, sat on the couch and cried. Jonathon never returned her calls. No matter how often she tried to ring. He kept the answerphone on.
So she decided that maybe cats were better than men after all. She still had Fred and Oscar and Jonathon and Mitch, …and the new kitten, Maxine LaChat, from the people who had moved away from next door
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