Posterity

Dr. Pepper sneezed once more into the Oxford English Dictionary he’d hidden behind all morning, not liking to sneeze in public since inheriting the Pepper title from the father he knew largely through press clippings and television commercials, and the annual bikini barbecue bacchanalia at the Texas ranch where the legend sought to instill in his son the familial talent for effervescence, he who had seemingly never once sneezed, much less stared at the lovely young waitress of the Jockey Club reading room over the top of the Oxford English Dictionary and whispered, as if to his immortal soul, “callipygian,” meaning, from the Greek, as I would learn, “having shapely buttocks.”

Dr. Pepper rubbed his red, irritated eyes. “Thank you,” he said, shutting the OED and returning my monocle.

“Of course,” I said, touching my top hat with a white glove, and rotating on my lap the showman’s cane my father, and his before, had wielded so jauntily, in tails and seemingly no pants at all, across the fifty states in a ceaseless, or but lately ceasing, celebration of Earth’s fecundity.

“The words in there,” said Dr. Pepper, “just wonderful,” gazing wistfully at the reading room’s staff door. “How’s the peanut allergy treatment going?” he inquired in a considerate undertone, as the waitress returned with mineral waters.

“I think the hives are getting smaller,” I said. The callipygian one passed back through the staff door. “Our fathers would have had her across their laps by now, wouldn’t they?” I remarked, twirling my cane, dropping it with a clatter.

“It’s a different world,” said Dr. Pepper. “A better one,” he added, blowing his nose.

“To your health, my dear Dr. Pepper,” I said, raising a mineral water.

“And to yours, my dear Mr. Peanut,” he said. “This stuff, you’ll be glad to know, is uncommonly high in magnesium.”

“And lithium,” I said.

We smiled, more or less.

I could see poor Pepper on the edge of his vast, undisturbed bed, looking up the content of the Jockey Club’s mineral water, maybe at the very moment, when, giving up on a bout of mindfulness meditation, I myself had looked up the content of the club’s mineral water. With my cane I pushed aside a drapery and for a while we gazed together at dust motes by the millions scintillating their seconds in the beam falling on an antique globe, set at the rakish angle that gave rise, in these latitudes, to the long winter and the fecundity of springtime.