Essays in Idleness

A young friend, who must work for a living, was caught out of town on a job, attending to someone’s “emergency”; when he received an important, if garbled, message. It was about his wife. She — coincidentally, also young — was in hospital. He decided that he must go to her, right away. His customer, whose emergency was only in her head, could wait.

Now, if one doesn’t own a car, it is nearly impossible to get around Ontario. Merely getting to his work assignment, not that far out of Toronto, had been a nightmare. No bus. Once there, he was stranded. I won’t go into this, however. It might make me angry.

Luckily for my friend, he had another friend, too, who was unafraid of our roving Batflu gestapo. He was picked up in an hour, and driven right downtown, to the hospital’s very door. After passing through multiple layers of front-desk bureaucracy, he was finally able to learn what had happened to his wife, and as a bonus, what room she was in. (Sharp eyes, that young man.) Uninterested in getting permission to visit, he walked off.

Someone seemed to be calling him back, but he couldn’t hear, because the elevator door was closing.

It was as he had suspected. The baby had arrived, a little early; their first. His wife was holding him in her arms as he broke into the maternity suite. And she had the most serene, the most beatific smile, as she raised one arm to greet him, and invite him to draw near. Then kissed him, and pulled him nearer, into this tight little triangle: man, woman, child.

And what she said he will not forget, should he live to be one hundred. They were just two words, that could excite any grammarian. They were:

“We three.”

I emphasized the youth of this couple — twenty, and nineteen, respectively, I think — for a reason. Also I will mention that they were properly married, even before the child was conceived. I only learnt of them, thanks to this Idleblog; apparently, some young Catholics know how to read. (Home-schooled, of course.) And there may be others.

The world, as gentle reader may have noticed, is going to hell.

But not all of it is going.