In a word . . . reflective

I know where you were last summer. Everyone does. Remember? Wednesday, August 12th last, 2.18pm-4.27pm. When, for once, the sun shone having no alternative.

Yes, that afternoon is up there with 9/11, Italia '90 and, if you're old enough, the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22nd, 1963. One of those events indelibly impressed on the psyche, forever.

Anyhow, there you were in those damn reflective sunglasses again. Always the official announcement that it’s summer, but so annoying. Do you not realise how rude it is? Do you not know how impossible it is to conduct any sort of meaningful conversation with anyone wearing those sunglasses while looking yourself in the eye? All the time?

The only occasion I choose to address my own face with such deliberation is when I shave every morning and attend in detail to all ablutions so as to spare myself the ordeal of having to look at that visage and its manifest imperfections at any other time throughout the day. Not least since, as with Goldsmith’s village master, I also learned to trace the day’s disasters in that morning face. There you were talking about your recent trips to places where the sun seems on permanent holiday and all I could think of was that scar on my left temple and how it seems more obvious in sunlight. You know the one?

The one I got that time before my mother came to visit all those years ago and a sort of panic set in as I decided the place needed a major clean-up. But no one had warned me before about the dangers of having mats on carpets. How was I to know you could trip over one when hoovering a bedroom carpet and then land dead-hit against the edge of a cabinet of drawers? The blood, the blood . . .

Or that I should have had the gushing wound stitched to avoid scarring. No one ever told me that either. And I don’t need to be reminded on rare sunny days in rarer summers by someone rude enough to wear reflective glasses when talking to me. Take them off.

Reflective, Reflect+ive . Reflect from Middle English reflecten, itself from the Latin reflectere, to bend back. -ive, a suffix which forms adjectives from verbs, meaning "pertaining to, tending to".

[ inaword@irishtimes.com ]