Letter From America: Rose In Hand
Ronnie Bray tells the tale of a dour Yorkshire chap and a pair of crozzled boots.
Ronnie's reflections which led to the writing of this column, which has been maturing in the Open Writing vaults, occurred as summer heat was about to grab hold of the town of Mesa, Arizona.
Omar the tentmaker wrote of ill-fated good intentions in his Rubaiyat:
Indeed repentance oft before I swore,
But was I sober when I swore?
And then, and then came Spring, and Rose-in-hand
My thread-bare Penitence apieces tore.
That verse came into my mind this morning as I checked the weather report for the Mesa area of Arizona. I could hardly believe my eyes! It seemed as if Mother Nature had repented of her usual plans to frizzle us to death, or at least to translate us into the state of wet leather boots that have been dried in a gas oven that was set on high, and then forgotten.
That brings to mind a story, which is possibly apocryphal, but if you have ever ruined a perfectly good pair of boots using the short-cut method of drying, you will appreciate the fragments of truth that are sprinkled throughout the tale.
It is told that one Amos, a phlegmatic worthy, got his boots drenched during a thunderstorm, and needing them to be presentable in a hurry he put them inside the oven of his Yorkshire Range, slammed the door, and pulled out the damper. That done, he mashed himself a brew and sat back in his easy chair to set the world aright and scour the paper for spelling mistakes. It was a harmless hobby, and one that kept him out of mischief. Then as teatime readers do, he fell asleep.
Waking from a dream, he smelled the peculiar odour of roast boot ‘a’ la crozzle,’ as a chef de cuisine would say. It was but a few frantic seconds until he traced the source of the fragrance and then, hardly burning his fingers at all, he retrieved his smoking boots from their crematorium, and laid them inside the fender to cool.
When they were sufficiently reduced in temperature to allow non-injurious touching, he inspected them closely, as a watchmaker might do to the delicate movement of a gold hunter. Amos realised that his crispy crunchy boots had shrunk several sizes, and so would be no more use to him. So, he determined to sell them.
He picked up his newspaper from where it had fallen when he had fallen into slumber, filled out the advertisement coupon, put it in an envelope and sent it off to the advertising department. Three days later, he was gratified to read his advertisement in the classified section of his daily read.
FOR SALE: a pair of riding boots, size 7.
Apply evenings to No. 3 Riley Street
Damside, Newsome
Two nights later there came a knock at his door. Opening it, Amos found a gentleman who said he had come in response to his advertisement for riding boots. Amos admitted him into his front room, where the boots were stood on a sheet of paper on the polished table.
The gentleman picked them up and examined them. His face grew ever more discomposed as his brief but penetrating scrutiny progressed. Finally, he placed them back on the table with what can only be described as a disdainful flick of the wrist, and said in a tone not to be confused with fragility, "Do you call them riding boots!?"
The loudness of his rhetoric made Amos wince but did not otherwise phase him. In the avuncular tone peculiar to the West Riding, Amos parried, then thrust, "Of course they’re riding boots. If you don’t think so, just you try walking in ‘em!" It is rumoured locally that Amos planted pansies in them and kept them on the sideboard.
Last week, daytime temperatures flirted with the high eighties and low nineties Fahrenheit. We know it can’t last, and when the temperature abandons the ninety degrees level to soar like an eagle to the normative summer standard of a hundred and ten to the occasional hundred and fifteen or more, we then know that both winter and spring are so far behind that we might never see them again, and when the heat strikes it will last for a minimum of five months, during which period we shall shelter indoors as if we were Solophobic.
During that time, Montana and Alaska begin to look like promising alternatives, although there seems to be no great migration of Sunbirds to the regions of the Snowbirds for exchange visits. Khayyam’s moth-eaten repentance was represented in today’s weather report by the promise of today’s and tomorrow’s temperatures reaching unseasonably mild seventy-one and seventy-six respectively. And that was the Rose in hand of, one had hoped, an earnestly penitent Weather Person.
But, the Weather Person his ‘penitence apieces tore’ by threatening that after the weekend the temperature might just break the hundred degrees mark. And, once it does that it does not know when or where to stop. When it comes, no one sunbathes. That is, unless they want to end up serving some frivolous horticultural function on Amos’ sideboard. There is, then. Little we can do, except to turn again to the words of the Persian and intone with him:
Ah Love! could thou and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire,
Would not we shatter it to bits - and then
Re-mould it nearer to the Heart's Desire!
Say, twenty or thirty degrees cooler?
Copyright © 2006 – Ronnie Bray
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
