"Six pints of bitter," said Ford Prefect to the barman of the Horse and Groom. "And quickly please, the world's about to end."
The barman of the Horse and Groom didn't deserve this sort of treatment; he was a dignified old man. He pushed his glasses up his nose and blinked at Ford Prefect. Ford ignored him and stared out of the window, so the barman looked instead at Arthur, who shrugged helplessly and said nothing.
So the barman said, "Oh yes, sir?" Nice weather for it," and started pulling pints.
He tried again.
"Going to watch the match this afternoon then?"
Ford glanced round at him.
"No, no point," he said, and looked back out of the window.
"What's that, foregone conclusion then you reckon, sir?" said the barman. "Arsenal without a chance?"
"No, no," said Ford, "it's just that the world's about to end."
"Oh yes, sir, so you said," said the barman, looking over his glasses this time at Arthur. "Lucky escape for Arsenal if it did."
Ford looked back at him, genuinely surprised.
The barman breathed in heavily. "There you are, sir, six pints," he said.
Arthur smiled at him wanly and shrugged again. He turned and smiled wanly at the rest of the pub just in case any of them had heard what was going on. None of them had, and none of them could understand what he was smiling at them for.
A man sitting next to Ford at the bar looked at the two men, looked at the six pints, did a swift burst of mental arithmetic, arrived at an answer he liked and grinned a stupid hopeful grin at them.
"Get off," said Ford. "They're ours," giving him a look that would have made an Algolian Suntiger get on with what it was doing.
Ford slapped a five pound note on the bar. He said, "Keep the change."
"What, from a fiver? Thank you, sir."
"You've got ten minutes left to spend it."
The barman simply decided to walk away for a bit.
Ford obviously knows something that no one else in the Horse and Groom knows. The world IS about to end. Arthur doesn't know this, just like he doesn't know that his friend, Ford, is from Betelgeuse. For Arthur, it's just Thursday. For Ford, it's the apocalypse.
It's Friday. End of the first week of a new semester. End of my first week back at work after my vacation. End of a week of sickness. I'm still sick. My mind is still at Walt Disney World. And, every once in a while, I check the Disney app on my phone to see what the wait times are at EPCOT and the Magic Kingdom. (In case you're interested, there's a 70-minute wait at The Twilight Zone Tower of Terror.)
This week has seemed very long. I've allowed myself to get swallowed in day-to-day struggles, just like Arthur. I'm worried that my cough will develop into pneumonia, and Arthur is worried about the bulldozers waiting to demolish his house. In the mean time, neither of us have any idea whether the world will be here tomorrow (or in the next ten minutes). It's a matter of living in the present (enjoying a pint at the pub) or living in the possibilities of the future (serious illness, loss of house/home).
I'm sitting in the living room of my family's house, watching my sister eat dinner. She's 53-years-old and has Down syndrome. Like most people with Down syndrome her age, my sister's memory is failing. She gets up from her chair about ten or 15 times during dinner, wanders out into the kitchen, and then sometimes forgets why she's gone out to the kitchen. I see her stop, look back at the dining room table with a confused look on her face.
Food is important to my sister. So is Diet Coke. And her latch hook rug. These are my sister's present. The only things she thinks about. She tries to keep track of the days of the week, but she can't. She just got up from her dinner, walked over to the calendar on the refrigerator, and said, "Tomorrow be Monday." As I said, she really has no concept of anything but right here, right now.
Perhaps this is a blessing. She doesn't think every minute about things she's lost. About my sister who died four years ago. My father who died a year ago. She doesn't think every minute about things she could lose. My mother, who wanders back and forth through the living room, looking for something that she's can't remember she's misplaced. None of these things enter her mind daily.
Her pleasures are pretty simple. Her grilled cheese sandwich. The Diet Coke sweating on the table in front of her. The yarn for her latch hook lined up in a row.
Saint Marty's pleasures tonight are going to be simple, too: NyQuil, a cool pillow, warm blankets.
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