Words and Thoughts: The Din of Inevitability, the Babble, Even

Hello again, alleged readers!  Last week I read an advertisement for a custom grave headstone that read, “When the time comes, how will your story be remembered?”

I have to say, I had never thought about that question before, but it certainly is a powerful question. I don’t plan to go out anytime soon, or quietly for that matter, but eventually, inevitably.  What story would be mine… and how would it be remembered? I read on. The ad further explained that I could, for a modest fee, ensure my story could be remembered in a number of ways: A bowling pin etched lovingly into the granite was one option. Jeff Gordon’s signature “24” carved into rock was another. These were certainly both tellers of great stories, but they weren’t my story. Then I remembered the time I wrote a story.

Not only did I remember the time, but I remembered the story! I called the number in the ad and said, “Hello, yes, I’m interested in a headstone, and I want my story on it, please include the following”

“Stav’s Story from that one time: The Awful Time We Had When The Titbabblers Moved In Next Door”

I’ll spare you any of the typical niceties that waltz frivolously through the front door in most story beginnings. Even now, years later, so great is my perturbation, that I simply can’t bring myself to frolic about in the meadows of setting, establishment, and introduction.  Besides, it’s there, in the title. Where would one even begin when retelling the awful time we had when the Titbabblers moved in next door?

The day they arrived is where we’ll start this story, I suppose. I was preparing to leave for my job, a mundane job, the type of job that one finds themselves blending into the wallpaper when they begin to describe it. I waved at our neighbors across the way, Portuguese, like the rest. As I rolled out of the car park to head east, they were heading west.  owards me. Then past me. In my rearview mirror, I got my first glimpse of those that I would come to know to call The Titbabblers.

At the end of that fateful day, I returned home, westbound down the lane. Yet I was forced to stop short in my tracks, because of this loud fellow in the middle of the road, carrying on about Lord knows what. Before I could honk, he scuttled out of the way. And I, bewildered, turned in, parking beside our garden. My son, Robert, burst forth from the front door before I had scarcely gathered my tuning fork from the rear of the auto.

“They don’t speak Portuguese!” Robert cackled.

Neither did Robert.  Not because it wasn’t his native tongue, rather it was because he was ill of mind in that way.

“Who?” I asked, only half interested.

“The Titbabblers!”  Robert boisterously clarified.

“The what?” I inquired, horrified at his impropriety.

Robert ceased his cackling at once. He struck a deadly serious gaze. Sauntered over to where I stood, mouth agape, looked me right in the mouth, and whisper-shouted, “The. Titbabblers.”

“Oh.”

Robert bounded back from whence he came, back to his PlayStation, or scooter, or some such thing.

It was exactly then though, that I heard them, from over my shoulder.  The racket.  The nonsense.  The insufferable din of the Titbabblers.”

Yeah, either that or the bowling pin I guess.