“Come on in! Have some fun!”
That invitation—coming from one of four guys pumped on something stronger than sun, all four doing their own kind of homeland security, all of them posted outside a bar in this, the middle of a weekday afternoon, here in the middle of sky-big, sun-amped Montana—was, not surprisingly, not at all a pass, lateral or otherwise, in my direction.
Not when the first of us to cross any one of those eight, paired guy-eyes was my attractive, my looking-decidedly-younger-than-her-years wife, and our own equally attractive, calendar-younger daughter. With me lagging enough behind. Just enough so to make both lasses look like they’d not ever be with a guy so grey above the ears as me. Not by choice, certainly. Not by any stretch of any guy’s imagination. Let alone the beer-and-a-bump imaginations of these particular guys.
“Come on in!” one bleats, beating his buddies to their own blurts. “Have some fun!”
Those guys, those four, all four steadied by the four legs of their chairs, those chairs outside a bar, mid-afternoon, all of us, this very mid-afternoon, somewhere south of Pray, in southern Montana. All four guys, at the least, the bar’s own welcome committee; at best, the town’s chamber of commerce; at worst, just four guys hoping, hoping for their own, anyone’s, version of the best.
Me, remembering a younger me, can’t blame them, though, for trying.
“Come on in! Have some fun!”
A come-hither, at once consummate, consummation itself still anyone’s guess.
Meanwhile, this hither worth the hither, brew-breathed or otherwise.
Y’miss most, y’get lucky once, y’go to bed counting the day good, they gotta be thinking.
And, always, always, the prospect of another come-hither, lucky, if luck revisits, and another, at the end of the day, good day.
So, yeah, why not. “Come on in! Have some fun!”
© 2011, Dónal Kevin Gordon
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