Serious

   We visited their house when their workday was over, on Monday evening. For Peter and me that was just a regular vacation and nothing special, but I could imagine how long that particular day was for them. Especially for Mrs. Bowood. For a while I felt a kind of strong curiosity concerning Mr. Bowood who has been teaching Peter versification and attaching special importance to rhyme. Perhaps even more importance than that to rhythm. Because Peter’s grandmother and Bowood’s family were good friends, I liked the idea of getting to know them too. As a child, Peter didn’t pay much attention to reading but somehow started to compose verses in his head. So as the time passed by and he grew up, he was slowly coming back to poems after years.

   We brought a bottle of wine that went well with poultry. When every one of us sat around the table, we pulled our chairs closer to the table while we were listening to Mr. Bowood talking about his publications and trips, about his verses and literary clubs, about his literary friends and… And I tried to imagine all these people in their clingy clothes talking and laughing while someone was standing in the middle of the high stage in the other hall and were reciting poems to people who were listening. When we finished eating, and Peter and Mr. Bowood went to the library because Mr. Bowood wanted to find some of his numerous collections of his poems. Mrs. Bowood and I were talking about this and that. It was interesting to have a conversation with her. She had been working at university for more than thirty years. They have three children. They are all grown up and had their own families now. Everything sounded so great, but for reasons unknown to me I saw sadness somewhere there deep in her grey eyes. That sadness seemed to me so big that I was strongly preoccupied with it at once.
“Do you write poems too?” I asked Mrs. Bowood finally the question that interested me the whole evening long.
“Me?” she wondered. “No, I don’t. I actually used to write stories. I guess I was quite good at storytelling,” Mrs. Bowood said in a quiet voice. Her last sentence was heard by her husband, who came into the dining room, holding his two new manuscripts in his hands. Peter was following him with a notebook and a pen.
“You know, that wasn’t serious,” Mr. Bowood pronounced easily to his wife.

   When we left them, I was deeply touched by everything what I had heard that day. Peter didn’t say anything that was relevant to the topic. He said something about tomorrow but it didn’t matter to me much now. The silence of the cold night hung between us and after saying goodbye to him, I took a bus.
“…that wasn’t serious,” I repeated these words again and again, and then once more, when the bus driver closed the doors of the bus leaving a small dot that looked like Peter far away. The repetition of these words seemed was needed to me. These words were insistantly trying to persuade me. However, that time I knew they didn’t persuade me at all and when I saw my house in a distance, I made a choice. 


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