The Boogeyman's Lullabye

Beds, Closets, and Englishmen

  Getting articulation lessons from an Irishman is one of the most interesting experiences a person could go through.  

"Talkin'."

"No, no.  Add a nice and soft 'g' at the end, and please try to sound less nasal, yer guests will think you have a cold."

"What if I do have a cold?"

"Blow your nose discreetly.  Now again: I enjo-yed talk-in' with you."

"You dropped the 'g'.  Do you have a cold, Redmond?"

  There are times when I honestly wonder how Redmond is able to put up with me for entire days at a time.  To myself my points are common-sense and reasonably asked, but I understand that to most adults they are 'trivial' and 'rude', as my father would put it on the few occasions he would be around to hear them.  Normally he was off doing things that Englishmen did in Ireland, things that looked very busy and boring and staunch.  Things my father would tell me were grown-up things and that a girl of seventeen didn't have to worry, just that the buisinessy things were what moved us to Dalkey, where every adult was just like my father, except they spoke like Redmond.

  Except Redmond was not like the other adults here, for the sheer reason that he heard my question and instead of brushing it off, instead of ignoring it, he tapped a finger on the dark wooded table in front of me and said in a voice a bit too coy for an adult,

"Yer cleverness stopped being cute when you turned seven.  Now, pay attention before your father's company gets here, we can't have you filling the house with horrendous inarticulation."  For all that I do to Redmond, I will give him the congratulations for being the only adult who, while his arguments generally did not make sense, was able to earn enough respect with his well-timed retorts.  So, for the next two hours, I rehearsed a new vocabulary of words and what proper way to use them in sentences.

  This was one of the many reasons I was very secretly glad that I had Redmond.  Secretly because Redmond was a very firm advocate of never expressing frivolous emotions towards people who did not need nor deserve them.  But he did.  Redmond had been hired by my very-busy father and very-distracted mother to take care of the inner workings of our slightly-too-large home and oversee my lessons.  At the time I was five.  I suppose I was a bit too much of a handful then, too, but consequently the young age also allowed me barely any memories without Redmond.  And when someone preoccupies a large majority of your memories in a very good way, then it's only courteous to be glad they exist.

  Also, Redmond knows a dangerous amount about me.  In fact, aside for Michael, he knew pretty much everything.  From how to tame wavy blonde bed-head to which dress I would put up the least fuss wearing, Redmond could probably teach a class on the intricacies of my workings.  And it wasn't smart to not like someone who knows a lot about you.  

  After the second hour, in which Redmond had switched from articulation lessons to the Cello, the door to the dining room(the only room that Redmond decided I could almost pay attention in) jarringly opened without pretext, and the Cello made a deep-boned, painful screeching sound.  Redmond didn't so much as flinch.  My father, walking in as he fixed his already-straight tie and one almost invisible piece of brown hair flipping onto the side of his face, cursed loud enough to make Redmond thin his already-thin lips.  Acknowledging the floorboards on which he placed a leather-bound suitcase, my father in all of his pale-skinned, brown-eyed, well-trimmed demeanor demanded quite inarticulately,

"The bloody hell you two doin' in here?"  I heard my father's voice when other adults came into our home, and it seemed like a different man, almost like and English Redmond, had taught him to speak 'properly' in just minutes.