Had you stepped inside the fashionable Fargo Barbecue the other day, you would have seen a local gallant named Snapper Darrill Rush dining with his inamorata. On the table between the lovebirds, amid clean-picked rib bones and one or two fugitive beans, you would also have seen the cell phone of Mr. Rush. Had your entrance come at what was to be a fateful moment, you would have heard that cell phone ring, and you would have seen the inamorata reach out and answer it.
That was her first mistake.
This gross impudence naturally outraged Mr. Rush, and because his woman made him “angry,” he naturally drew out his “folding knife” and “chased her around the restaurant.” He caught her, too. Thereupon, with the righteous dudgeon of a man whose cell phone has been answered, he “slashed her arm.”
Perceiving that it was not, perhaps, the best time to ask if she might make use of Snapper’s phone, the bleeding woman then “asked the owner to use the restaurant’s phone.”
That was her second mistake, for this heartless reminder of the recent indignity “further angered Rush.” The newspaper does not say what he then did with his cell phone or knife, but with respect to his inamorata, he “dragged her into a car,” and “drove off.”
But, as the poet tells us, amantium irae amoris integration est.*
A short time after, police discovered the injured woman in the hospital emergency room, a doting Snapper at her side, and what we can only suppose was his “T-shirt tied around her arm.”
* “Lover’s quarrels are the renewal of love.” Terrence (c. 150 B.C.)
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Is this another anecdote of our coming apart as a culture?
That’s what I’m trying to convey with my high-low telling of these stories.
I feel like there might be a larger drama that could link these and similar anecdotes together. The challenge would be to come up with a unifying story arc.