Leonard and Hungry Paul

by Ronan Hession

When an only child loses their second parent, the calendar of the generations turns a page.

How can we just walk around leading normal lives when we know that that sort of thing is going on above our heads? We’d all be a little less precious about our lot if we truly appreciated that the whole thing was going to end up as some sort of tiny full stop eventually. I suppose you just have to trust the science, but it is blind faith really beyond a certain point, at least as far as I’m concerned.’

‘It’s not just external circumstances,’ answered Leonard. ‘I feel myself getting smaller. I feel quieter and more, I don’t know, invisible. There is this palpable sense of physics; that my life is being pulled inwards. One thing has led to another and now I feel that if I don’t do something, I’ll just carry on some minor harmless existence.’

Without thinking, they both looked up at the inky universe they had just been talking about, as the big torchlight moon shone down on the snails criss-crossing the driveway. Leonard stepped over them and made his way home, carrying with him the things he had said over the course of the evening; things he hardly knew he knew.

‘To whom it may concern’ has a certain letter-in-a-bottle sound to it, in that it seeks to engage the reader without specifying, or attempting to find out, their name, surname, title, gender or position. It also leaves open the possibility that the letter may not be relevant to the reader at all; the ‘may’ suggesting that this might all be the wildest of goose chases after the loosest of gooses.

‘That’s fundraising, not charity. Totally separate things. Charity transforms both giver and receiver for the better. It is rightly described as a virtue. Fundraising or donating to charity and all the other variations on that theme are something else: a tangle of mixed motivations and results, some good, some questionable.

As you both change, you will periodically lose each other. You need to find each other again and—here’s the trick—instead of trying to rekindle what you had, you need to reinvent yourselves and your relationship. You have to keep starting new relationships with the same person. This won’t make any sense to you now, but at some stage in your marriage to Andrew this may become very important.’

Leonard wanted to ignite children’s imaginations about the world around them, and to inspire their curiosity. There would be plenty of time for them to learn the rough lessons of life, but shouldn’t they first be allowed to develop very special ideas about the world?

It may well be that if you truly want to open a heart, you need to break it open.

It assumed that what was of real interest to the letter reader were the preceding paragraphs and merely pointed out their noteworthiness, while also leaving the door open if the reader felt otherwise. Most importantly, it added nothing new to the letter, and in doing so, got to the heart of the matter, in that sign-off phrases are merely a device to avoid an otherwise abrupt conclusion to the correspondence.

‘The short run can often be full of feelings,’ observed Hungry Paul, sagely.

‘The statue people are pretty much at war with the mime artists. There have been a few incidents and the whole thing could blow up any day. The problem for the mime artist is that life is so noisy now, they are being left behind. We live in an age of cacophony. Everyone talking and thinking out loud, with no space or oxygen left for quiet statements and silence.

We are never entirely outside of life’s choices; everything leads somewhere.

I guarantee that I will fail each and every time. I can’t be spontaneously profound. And do you know what? It doesn’t matter. Or rather it shouldn’t matter but it does, at least to you it does. Anyone can say something beautiful in the moment. Anyone can deliver the right line. But that’s not real. That doesn’t prove anything. What matters is what a person is really like. What matters is what a person is prepared to reveal to you in real time in the real world, when there is no soundtrack in the background and no games going on.

He was so…what’s the word I’m looking for? Tender. Yes, that’s it, tender. I had never realised that it was possible to make someone feel so loved at the very moment you are letting them go.

The kids’ lives are their own. From day one you are handing it back to them bit by bit, until they move on.