On the List

Upon occasion as I was growing up, someone would do something that my father would consider a slight. It didn't have to be anything remarkable: a careless remark, a presumptuous act, an ill-advised joke. It didn't take much at all for my father to announce that the perpetrator of the alleged effrontery was...on the list.

I remember one time when Vinnie, one of Dad's best friends, was discussing his reasons for not joining a particular yacht club. "The members there are mostly civil servant types," Vinnie, a law professor, began, "so I decided--"

Vinnie caught himself. My father was a twenty-five year firefighter, a deputy chief, and fiercely proud of his role in providing for the public safety. Vinnie tried to recoup. "Joe, I didn't mean like you, you're like an executive, I meant they're like, you know..."

But it was too late. Vinnie was on the list, and though their friendship would continue, it would never be the same. To some extent, Vinnie would be on the list until the day he died. It isn't difficult to get on the list, but it is next to impossible to get off.

Maybe it's an Irish thing; you know, an ability to nurture revenge that seems inborn in the Hibernian psyche. In the old days, the irritants were land annexation and prima nocte laws; lately they're parking in front of my house when there's space in front of yours and sitting at the next table and yakking on your cell phone.

Recently a lady who shall go unnamed was asking advice of me and her equally Irish-bred son-in-law regarding her next-door neighbor. The neighbor had called to ask about installing a stockade fence with the structural members (the "ugly side") facing out. "Would you mind?" the neighbor wanted to know. I felt the familiar pounding in my temples and saw the black spots gathering at the edges of my vision, but I managed to stifle any outburst with a new-found level of maturity. I would put the neighbor on the list, and then practice the next part of the sequence, which is called biding time.

Young Brian, however, practiced no such restraint. As his wife Stacy rolled her eyes, he stormed out into the yard and began pacing along the property line, gesticulating at the location where the offensive barrier had been proposed. "Here?" he demanded. "She wants to put the ugly side here? Well, she's on the list!"

The unnamed lady stood firm, and the beautiful six-foot cedar stockade fence was installed with the structural side facing in, as required by law and good manners. Nevertheless, the neighbor, lovely in every other circumstance, remains on Brian's list.

And, hell yeah, on mine too.