Two Pints of Pear Cider

I had worked very hard on an e-mail newsletter all afternoon yesterday, so after running around town to do chores I decided to reward myself with a cool beverage. There's a very nice bar uptown that's usually almost deserted on Saturday afternoons. That was true yesterday—it was so slow that the hostess's face positively lit up when I walked in, as if I were her oldest and best friend and we hadn't seen each other in months. By the time I had settled myself at the bar, she had subsided again into her own seat at a table by the wall, looking bored and sad.

I ordered a pear cider. Liquor made from pears tends to have an attenuated quality; it hints at the flavor, you catch it on the breeze, you might say, like the scent of burning leaves in the fall, or the sudden recall of some long-ago joy. So I'm sitting with my drink, deeply content, and mulling the young woman's problem. It must feel like she's invited the entire world to a party, I thought, and out of the whole world, only a few people bothered to show up. And then I winced.

How long ago was it—twenty years, possibly?—but the memory bit into my conscience. A friend had invited me to a party, and I said sure, and then something came up or I was tired or didn't feel like making the drive or something, but I figured I wouldn't be missed, really, and I'd apologize afterward. Well, this woman invited ten or twelve people to this party and everyone else did what I did—decided not to go. Not one person showed up.

I've done terrible, awful things in my life, and asked forgiveness when I could and sought to forgive myself, but not showing up at that stupid party will plague me a little forever. My own part in it was relatively trivial, a minor lapse, we were all very casual then about everything. But for everyone to fail to come! Who could have foreseen that? How the poor woman must have sat, like a bride jilted at the altar!

While I was sitting there, chuckling ruefully at this long-ago lapse and having another cider, they had a kind of changing of the guard as the dinner hour came on. The bored hostess went out the door briskly, revived, like school was letting out. A few minutes later, about five enormously fat men came downstairs from the upper deck. They lingered downstairs, milling around ponderously, and then went out. The new hostess and I grinned mean little grins at each other. Then I felt bad. It's the content of your character that matters, even if you look like the dancing hippos in Fantasia, which I have to say, in my defense, that they did. Sigh! My conscience was bothering me again and if consciences could be recalibrated like the timing system in old cars, it would probably be a good thing.