Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays Read Online Free PDF

warmly at you, but there normally won’t be any of that strangerly chitchat in waiting areas or checkout lines. But now, thanks to the Horror, there’s something to talk about that overrides all inhibition, as if we were somehow all standing right there and just saw the same traffic accident. Example: Overheard in the checkout line at Burwell Oil (which is sort of the Neiman Marcus of gas station/ convenience store plazas—centrally located athwart both one-way main drags, and with the best tobacco prices in town, it’s a municipal treasure) between a lady in an Osco cashier’s smock and a man in a dungaree jacket cut off at the shoulders to make a sort of homemade vest: “With my boys they thought it was all some movie like that Independence Day, till then they started to notice how it was the same movie on all the channels.” (The lady didn’t say how old her boys were.)
    WEDNESDAY Everyone has flags out. Homes, businesses. It’s odd: you never see anybody putting out a flag, but by Wednesday morning there they all are. Big flags, small, regular flag-sized flags. A lot of homeowners here have those special angled flag-holders by their front door, the kind whose brace takes four Phillips screws. Plus thousands of the little handheld flags-on-a-stick you normally see at parades—some yards have dozens of these stuck in the ground all over, as if they’d somehow all just sprouted overnight. Rural-road people attach the little flags to their mailboxes out by the street. A good number of vehicles have them wedged in their grille or attached to the antenna. Some upscale people have actual poles; their flags are at half-mast. More than a few large homes around Franklin Park or out on the east side even have enormous multistory flags hanging gonfalon-style down over their facades. It’s a total mystery where people can buy flags this big or how they got them up there, or when.
    My own next-door neighbor, a retired bookkeeper and USAF vet whose home- and lawn-care are nothing short of phenomenal, has a regulation-size anodized flagpole secured in eighteen inches of reinforced cement that none of the other neighbors like very much because they feel it draws lightning. He says there’s a very particular etiquette to having your flag at half-mast: you’re supposed to first run it all the way up to the finial at the top and then bring it halfway down. Otherwise it’s some kind of insult. His flag is out straight and popping smartly in the wind. It’s far and away the biggest flag on our street. You can also hear the wind in the cornfields just south; it sounds roughly the way light surf sounds when you’re two dunes back from the shore. Mr. N—-’s pole’s halyard has metal elements that clank against the pole when it’s windy, which is something else the neighbors don’t much care for. His driveway and mine are almost right together, and he’s out here on a stepladder polishing his pole with some kind of special ointment and a chamois cloth—I shit you not—although in the morning sun it’s true that his metal pole does shine like God’s own wrath.
    “Hell of a nice flag and display apparatus, Mr. N—-.”
    “Ought to be. Cost enough.”
    “Seen all the other flags out everywhere this morning?”
    This gets him to look down and smile, if a bit grimly. “Something, isn’t it.” Mr. N—- is not what you’d call the friendliest next-door neighbor. I really only know him because his church and mine are in the same softball league, for which he serves with great seriousness and precision as his team’s statistician. We are not close. Nevertheless he’s the first one I ask:
    “Say, Mr. N—-, suppose somebody like a foreign person or a TV reporter or something were to come by and ask you what the purpose of all these flags after what happened yesterday was, exactly—what do you think you’d say?”
    “Why” (after a little moment of him giving me the same sort of look he usually gives my lawn), “to