I sat at a table outside an Irish pub, with a child I adored and a man I didn’t, in a resort

town in summer.

 

Another man sat on a folding chair attempting to entertain the diners with accordion

music. At first I wondered if he was a street person, so shabby was he. I heard the

waitresses call him Tool Moan.

 

How delicious, I thought. The accordion equals the tool, the music equals the moan?

Above, on the plaza,

 

a band (lead guitar, rhythm guitar, bass, drums) played, loudly, a funk version of Jimi

Hendrix’s “Voodoo Chile.” I wished I could hear the accordion music above the noise

 

but I couldn’t. Before we left home,

 

my mother had asked, as dinner conversation, “Are we moving through time or is time

moving around us?” “I think we’re moving through time, Mom”—I was full of my own

agency.

 

Actually time falls on us like a fine rain, almost unnoticed, soaking us to the bone.

 

Accordion music is the saddest music on earth: agree or disagree? I disagree.

 

Accordion music is delicate, like the feathers of snow on the mountains that surrounded

the town.

 

The man paid the bill. The child ran ahead. Delicate equals subject to damage (and

almost equals Celtic). “You have some competition tonight,” I said to Tool Moan as we

left.

 

“I know,” he said. Later, back in the hotel room, I realized I’d misheard. His name was

Tout le Monde (equals everybody in French) . . .

 

###

 

Kathleen Ossip is the author of The Cold War, which was named one of Publishers Weekly’s best books of 2011; The Search Engine, selected by Derek Walcott for the American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize; and Cinephrastics, a chapbook of movie poems. Her new book, The Do-Over, is forthcoming.

“Tool Moan” was originally published in Cry Baby (TLR Early Fall 2013).