Rivka's Stance

We all get depressed sometimes. Feel unable to keep up the fight, whatever fight that might be. Lose our head of steam.

This happened to Aloysius. More than once. Come with me and see how his friend Rivka Morgenstern snaps him out of it. At the end of this short passage, note how this pragmatic, strong-willed, and above all athletic woman sums the whole thing up in one brief, gobsmacking rant.

*****

Although his father and mother had cheered him up considerably in the short term, over time, it was apparent that Gack had lost his steam. He wasn’t experimenting with new flavours and ingredients in the brewery lab. He moped about on the brewery floor, even though Canfield had taken to bringing his banjo when he came to help Greinhalm, strumming and singing all manner of hilarious doggerel from the Great War on back, as far back as early Victorian times. Gack also hadn’t been behind the bar at The Pig & Trebuchet in weeks. Worst of all, he wasn’t visiting clients.

One day, Victoria even caught him just as he was about to put on plain matching socks.

Horrified at his lack of concern for what he had been about to do, she had insisted that he wear left sock an end-on-end pattern in thulian pink on ecru, right sock a Tattersall with the background in mint green and the stripes alternating between fulvous brown and sinopia. The effect was outrageous. She made him promise never to tell anyone how close he had come to ending his mismatching streak.

Everyone noticed his unusual behaviour and asked him about this slump of his. He’d just sigh and say, “I’m tired of the fight, is all. Maybe people just want everything average and the same these days. What’s the point in battling against it anymore?”

Then, one day, he made the mistake of saying that in the presence of Rivka Morgenstern.

“Right. Get your cycling gear on, then. Let’s go.”

They were all at the Gack manse, Charles and Rivka having visited with their children. When Aloysius made his sad defeatist pronouncement and Rivka reacted so forcefully, Victoria trotted off and asked the elder Gacks to mind the children for a bit.

Aloysius, wishing to enjoy his doldrums in peace, had one further objection in his arsenal. “But, Rivka, you and Charles have no cycling clothing; we can’t go.”

With a glance at his wife and a hangdog look for Aloysius, Charles replied, “She insists that we always have cycling gear in the boot.”

“And rowing outfits. Alright, let’s hop to it!”

And they settled their children with Archibald and Glennis, changed and were off.

As Rivka pushed them through an intense bicycling run along the paved path that paralleled the Thames, Aloysius gasped, “And Rivka, dear, why, precisely, are we doing this again?”

She glared at him, saddle to saddle. “Really, Aloysius.”

Gulping in the great lungfuls of air that his body needed to fuel itself with oxygen at Rivka-pacing levels, he looked over at her with left eyebrow raised in a question mark. And then right back at the road, as they were going too fast to allow of even the briefest inattention.

She replied effortlessly, not out of breath at all. They might as well have been lounging around sipping tea in the library. “‎It's simple, Aloysius, as far as I'm concerned. Human beings were meant to move, and we were meant to solve problems. The more interesting the problem, the better. I really don't understand why so many people walk around so bloody lost and confused all the time.”