Barney's Version

I don't hold with shamans, witch doctors, or psychiatrists. Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or even Dickens, understood more about the human condition than ever occurred to any of you. You overrated bunch of charlatans deal with the grammar of human problems, and the writers I've mentioned with the essence.

In a nutshell, I am not unaware of my failings. Neither am I a stranger to irony.

Bad days my memory functions no better than an out-of-focus kaleidoscope, but other days me recall is painfully perfect.

...if I were an angel of the Lord, I would mark the doors of each of my children's homes with an X, so that plague and misfortune would pass over them. Alas, I lack the qualifications. So when there was still world and time enough I fretted. I nagged. I corrected. I got everything wrong.

When a child is born, I once explained to the kids, some dads lay down bottles of wine for them that will mature when they grow up into ungrateful adults. Instead, what you're going to get from me, as each of you turns sixteen, is a library of the one hundred books that gave me the most pleasure when I was a know-nothing adolescent.

Following the death of his wife, Sam Johnson wrote to the Reverend Mr. Thomas Warton, "I have ever since seemed to myself broken off from mankind; a kind of solitary wanderer in the wilds of life, without any certain direction, or fixed point of view: a gloomy gazer on a world to which I have little relation." But my wife wasn't dead, merely absent.

But the truth is, nothing delights me more than a biography of one of the truly great that proves he or she was an absolute shit.

We could never agree about Boogie and I didn't share Miriam's reverence for professors. In fact, just in case I haven't mentioned it before, the pride of my office wall is my framed high-school graduation certificate, lit from above. Miriam has reproached me for it. "Take it down, darling," she once pleaded. But it still hangs there.

The truth is Canada is a cloud-cuckoo-land, an insufferably rich country governed by idiots, its self-made problems offering comic relief to the ills of the real world out there, where famine and racial strife and vandals in office are the unhappy rule.

But I hate being a grandfather. It's indecent. In my mind's eye, I'm still twenty-five. Thirty-three max. Certainly not sixty-seven, reeking of decay and dashed hopes. My breath sour. My limbs in dire need of a lube job. And now that I've been blessed with a plastic hip-socket replacement, I'm no longer even biodegradable. Environmentalists will protest my burial.

And what if Miriam and I were never to be reconciled?

There's no such thing as a superhuman. But the only thing I got to tell you, if you take a dog and kick him around he's got to be alert, he's got to be more sharper than you. Well, we've been kicked around for two thousand years. We're not more smarter, we're more alert.

All the same, it strikes me as unfair that I still have to defend myself against her moral judgements. My continuing need for her approbation is pathetic. Twice now I have stopped myself on the street to remonstrate with her, a crazy old coot talking to himself.

...I thought, breaking into a sweat, I'd better call Saul. I owe Kate an apology... Damn damn damn.

In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off, that ridiculous thingamabob that now comes with twenty push buttons, God knows what for. Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery.

Do you think she'd mind if, after the dinner, I slipped out for an hour and maybe caught the third period in the Forum?' 'Brides tend to be touchy about things like that.

You're convinced that anybody who meets you for the first time will consider you a shit, so you take preventive action. Relax, boychick. When they get to know you better they will realize that they were right. You are a shit.

Credevo che per Barney esistessi solo tu. Almeno questo è quello che dicono tutti. Senti, ambasciator non porta pena, ma secondo me non bisogna mai essere le ultime a sapere, e guarda che parlo per esperienza personale. Dorothy Weaver - tu non la conosci, ma non importa - lo ha visto mercoledì scorso al cocktail dei Johnson. E insomma, il tuo devoto maritino si era appiccicato ad una tizia. Le parlava fitto fitto, le sussurrava paroline all'orecchio. A un certo punto le ha persino massaggiato la schiena, e poi se ne sono andati insieme". "Non mi dici niente di nuovo". "Meno male, perchè l'ultima cosa al mondo che volevo era turbarti". "Vedi, il punto è che quella donna ero io. Usciti dai Johnson siamo andati al Ritz, abbiamo esagerato con lo champagne, e poi - ma guai se lo racconti in giro -, poi ho accettato di andare a casa con lui

...and then I began to drift, fighting tears. I used to come here with Miriam. Miriam, my heart's desire. What was troubling her this morning? Maybe Kate had reproached her on the phone for leaving me? How dare Kate. Oh yeah? Go for it, my darling. Remind her of what she's missing. No, don't.

Yes, carbon paper, if any of you out there are old enough to remember what that was. Why, in those days we not only used carbon paper but when you phoned somebody you actually got an answer from a human being on the other end..

In those olden times you didn't have to be a space scientist to manage the gadget that flicked your TV on and off... Doctors made house calls. Rabbis were guys. Kids were raised by their moms instead of in child-care pens like piglets. Software meant haberdashery. There wasn't a different dentist for gums, molars, fillings and extractions - one nerd managed the lot. If a waiter spilled hot soup on your date, the manager offered to pay her cleaning bill and sent over drinks, and she didn't sue for a kazillion dollars, claiming "loss of enjoyment of life.

Oh, dio mio, se fossi un angelo del Signore segnerei con una croce le porte di casa dei miei figli, in modo da tener lontano le sventure e la malattia. Purtroppo, per quell’alto incarico mi mancano i requisiti, e quando avevo ancora un ruolo nelle loro vite sono stato impaziente, critico e punitivo. Sbagliando sempre tutto.

C'è stato un tempo in cui osavo sognare che Miriam e io, superati i novanta, saremmo spirati insieme, come Filemone e Bauci. E allora un munifico Zeus, con un lieve tocco del caduceo, ci avrebbe trasformato in due alberi vicini, coi rami che si sfiorano d'inverno, le foglie che si intrecciano a primavera.