The Guinness Spot
After the Scottish jazz singer in the Festival barn I come on some lost acquaintances, willing to yarn as though we had never lost touch. Disintegrated dark holes in my life suddenly illuminated, banging on brightly like pin-table lights.
It's a round table, and here's reunion of knights!
`You remember George Acheson, from Derry?' He was jigging in offshore dusk like a night ferry, a youth I knew disguised as General Custer, skinny and bearded and shaking my hand to muster a warm response for someone he'd maybe rather forget. He looks old enough to be my father.
He was one of a teenage bunch, a nice lot humming like bees round my sister's honeypot, all different, but all drole and seeming sure of themselves, I thought I would never be so mature, admiring their cheek and their wit and horse-play, turning up at our door at dusk mysteriously.
And now his peculiar nasal drawl is approving a bit of my prose remembering Derry with the loving fascination of a child . . . days when the war was ending. My heart's delighted, for he is a part of a past I took to be dead. And here they are, alive and kicking without the aid of art.
James Simmons
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