Black is Henry

I remember, it was before Christmas and I was out buying gifts for my friends. Henry owned a small antique shop that was smashed in between several other small shops, all lost behind tan walls so that you couldn't see them from the road. Once you got inside of the labyrinth, though, you could tell which shop Henry owned: every day, as long as the shop was open, he would have an old phonograph playing old jazz, or opera, or big band music. I had visited the shop for two or three years without buying anything.

The day wasn't special, but it was the first day that I ever bought anything from my favorite shop. Henry knew it, and commented on it when I came up to his desk with several items in my hand. They were all small trinkets, the only thing that I could afford, and even then just barely, but he smiled at me. "Are we buying for people we choose to love, or people we're obligated to love?" He asked me. I told him they were for people I choose to love. He nodded back with an air of old-time wisdom.

"Those are always the ones that matter." He told me.

I had bought a deck of playing cards, a fountain pen, and an old hand-mirror from 1925. It was for a girl that I liked who liked me. It was secret. This was about a year after I promised myself that I wouldn't hold anymore of my own secrets.

Like all of my promises and vows, it quickly fell through.

The main point is this: while I was buying my gifts, Henry was on the phone with his "dearly beloved," as he put it. (He joked about the one time I decide to buy something, I force him to ignore his dearly beloved.) But while he was on the phone with her, I took down every detail of his words, his syntax, the tone of voice. Not that he was anything special, I almost always took down details, but there's always been a certain interest in me when it comes to how people talk with their dearly beloved's.

The way Henry talked to his that day was jokingly harsh. There was some problem of some sort, nothing important, but one of those small little things that bother people everyday, and are usually complicated in the process of fixing them. I presumed that the same tone, syntax, and word choice had been used before numerous times, and after I left the shop I thought about how his dearly beloved put up with it.

It took me about three weeks to start thinking that being in love is made up of about one-half of putting up with whomever your in love with. Who knows.