Epistemology(Barry) Ronda Wickford, assistant manager of the Brandenberg Supersaver Grocery Mart, located Scotty Bergeron over by the leafy-green vegetables filling a bin of baby carrots. “I need someone to run produce.” Scotty continued to spread the individual packages in the refrigerated case. A stocky middle-aged man, his dirty brown hair was still thick but fading to gray at the temples. “There’s a generous bump in salary plus benefits,” Rhonda added.

What she didn’t bother mentioning was that, choking back a fistful of tears, the current produce manager’s wife called the previous afternoon to say her husband had been on a bender since the third week in November. A distraught family was trying to coax Donovan O’Brien into rehab. Was it rehab or detox? Ronda couldn’t recall. And this wasn’t the first time; the hard-drinking employee had fallen off the wagon twice before.

Scotty stared at her with a blank expression. “Dewey’s next in line for the job. He’s got seniority and – ”

“Dewey Epstein’s a halfwit who couldn’t tie his shoelaces without a training manual much less manage a produce department.” Rhonda lowered her voice a handful of decibels. “More to the point, since Donovan hit the skids, while you’ve been doing three-quarters of his work and all of your own. Anyone with half a brain can see that.”

After Supersaver went union in the early nineteen sixties, it was harder to get rid of troublesome employees like Donovan O’Brien. Worse yet, the change sometimes afforded habitually lazy or unqualified workers leverage when a plum position came available. But Ronda possessed considerable leverage of her own in this particular instance. She wanted to sack Donovan over a month earlier, but the union representative begged her to hold off. He was going to straighten things out with the irascible Irishman, help him put his pathetic life back together. Think wonders. Shit blunders.

Pulling a box cutter out of a back pocket, Scotty slit the tape on a second carton of carrots. He glanced up but only for a split second without bothering to make eye contact. “Yes, I’ll take the job. When do I start?”

“Yesterday morning. I’m making it retroactive to the beginning of the week,” she replied and walked off.


Back in the main office Rhonda told Marna, who handled personnel, to upgrade Scotty to the new position.

“A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts,” Marna quipped. That’s got to be a first for the market.”

“I thought he worked maintenance at some community college in Minnesota,” Ronda replied. She slid into a swivel chair and fired up the Windows program. “He was a custodian. Twenty-six years.”

“I cleared the references when Scotty applied,” Marna replied, “the man was chairman of the philosophy department at Rutland Community College.”

Ronda watched the computer screen come to life, fleshing itself out with a dozen colorful program icons. Clicking on the Microsoft Excel tab, the circular bluish mouse symbol pulsated, waiting for the spreadsheet to load.

A philosophy professor in charge of string beans and Brussels sprouts.

Something had gone haywire. A stickler for details, Ronda would never just assume Scotty was a blue collar stiff. She brought up the accounts receivable invoices and started analyzing expenditures by departments.

Wait a minute! Now she remembered - a trivial incident. The day before Thanksgiving Ronda ran into the new produce manager sipping coffee in the employee lounge. “What a waste,” Scotty muttered.

“Excuse me?” She hadn’t spoken and had no idea what he was referring to. The man gestured toward an electrician in blue coveralls removing a fluorescent light fixture from the dropped ceiling grid. “If it was just a dead bulb, we’d replaced it,” Ronda replied, “but the whole unit’s shot.”

“Yes, but do you see the round compartment in the center of the fixture?” Ronda squinted at the light just as the workman pulled the aluminum housing free of the ceiling, lowering the bulky unit to a second worker standing beside the ladder. “There’s a small ballast resistor that controls the individual lights behind that plate. All the electrician had to do was replace the part, rewire a handful of connections and the light would operate good as new.” Scotty broke a piece off an apple Danish and washed the sticky dough down with a mouthful of coffee. “Now the store has to junk all that perfectly good metal and spend additional money on a replacement.”

“Yes, that’s true,” Ronda mused. What she opted not to mention was how many thousands of dollars corporate bigwigs routinely threw away on lavish perks and sublime foolishness. She considered herself fairly thick-skinned, but some of the extravagance made her want to retch.

That brief conversation in the employee lounge - yes, that was where she got the cockamamie notion Scotty was the hands-on type rather than an academic. Half an hour later, Marna left to bring a box of gift cards to customer service. When she was gone, Ronda hurried over to the file cabinet. Fishing through a stack of manila folders, she found what she was looking for:

Scott B. Bergeron age 58.
Chairman of the philosophy department
Rutland Community College, Rutland Minnesota.
Marital Status: widowed.
Children: two.


Ronda skimmed through the references, all glowing tributes to a dedicated academic and educator. A young Hispanic woman with a spidery hairnet covering her black curls knocked lightly and stuck her head in the door. Ronda crammed the file back in the drawer and slammed the cabinet shut. “Yes, Miriam?”

*****

Later that night at home Ronda tried to make sense out of fragments of reliable information, hearsay, idle gossip and innuendo she had puzzled together over the previous year regarding the taciturn enigma she had just promoted to produce manager.

Widowed with two children. The wife was dead. Was it an accident, chronic illness, stroke or fatal heart attack? No one at the market had any right asking what happened. There but for the grace of God… Of course the children would be young adults by now. And that business with the ballast resistor – if the man was previously married and paying a mortgage on his own place, he probably took more than just a passing interest in home repairs.

But why would a well-educated person moved half way across the country to end up at an entry level position in a supermarket? A college professor no less! The Supersaver routinely employed retirees to bag groceries, run down errant shopping carts in the parking lot and fulfill other menial positions, but this guy didn’t fit the mold. At fifty-eight he was far too young – too young by a dozen years – to be working for a few lousy bucks over minimum wage, padding a monthly social security check.

And his body language was all wrong. The tight-lipped fellow with the limpid hazel eyes that never quite settled on you for more than a fleeting millisecond, was infuriatingly disengaged. Detached from all the incestuous intrigues and petty bickering endemic to such workplaces.

Case in point: in November Adrian Peters, a divorcée from bookkeeping with a stunning figure, invited Scotty over to her place for dinner. The guy thanked Adrian profusely but noted a prior commitment. Perhaps he did have some other pressing engagement, but Scotty never bothered to follow up on the hospitality by asking for a rain check.

And regarding their brief exchange earlier in the day, Scotty seemed inconvenienced!

The serendipitous promotion to produce manager - it didn’t make a damn bit of difference. If Ronda had suggested, “Why don’t you take my job for the next five years, and I’ll price baby carrots and unload tractor trailers full of vegetables,” he might have just grinned foolishly and stared serenely into space. Like some middle-aged Hindu ascetic who renounces all worldly possessions, abandons wife and family to sit lotus style in a mountain cave contemplating his navel, Scotty Bergeron floated through his twilight years in a bland state of cosmic indifference.


The phone rang. “Hello mother.” Ronda slumped down on the living room couch and teased a scrap of lint from her rayon skirt. “That’s very sweet of you, but I’m spending the holidays with friends,” she lied. “Yes, people I know from the market. Thanks for the invite.” She chatted a few minutes longer and lowered the phone back onto the cradle.

Two weeks to Christmas. She had no plans other than to hunker down with a bottle of white wine and the latest Debbie Macomber novel. Ronda was addicted to the knitting series. They were holding the book, which had been out of circulation for weeks, at the front desk of the Brandenberg Public Library.

Last Christmas she was dating someone. That ended badly. Now she was alone and probably better off emotionally. Over the summer, Rhonda had come to the dour conclusion that romance was highly overrated. When things turned ugly, people wielded human affection like a lethal weapon. What people really needed wasn’t love with all its messy excess baggage but common decency. Better they should skip romance altogether and simply be kind to one another.

What to eat? Ronda shuffled to the kitchen and peered into the refrigerator. As store manager she could purchase the freshest vegetables and prime meat cuts on a daily basis. Instead she bought odds and ends from the deli. A quarter pound of Finlandia cheese. Another quarter pound of Boarshead roast beef. A couple of torpedo rolls from the self-serve bins near the bakery. “Will that be all?” The young girl behind the deli counter flashed Ronda a sick smile. What sort of stingy slob buys their meals in such meager quantities? Answer: dirt-poor loners and romantic losers.

Last Christmas when she was hopelessly enthralled by Mr. Wrong, Ronda cooked a teriyaki pork roast tenderloin. She used the pan drippings for marinade which she brushed over the succulent carrots and potatoes. As a side dish she sliced butternut squash together with baking apples– for tantalizing flavor she always bought braeburn, northern or empire—which she heaped together with brown sugar, cinnamon and cranberries. The aromatic concoction went in the oven along side the pork.

For the pièce de résistance, Ronda made a special trip five miles across town to an Italian specialty store where she bought a round loaf of panettone, which she cut up in bite-size chunks. She mixed the sweetbread with raisins and vanilla pudding. Scooping the sticky batter into a Teflon cupcake pan, she set the timer for twenty minutes. When the desert came out of the oven Ronda sprinkled rum over the toasted crust and finished the culinary masterpiece with a dollop of whipped cream - the homemade variety, not from an aerosol can.
That’s how a woman cooked when she was in love. Or imagined she was before the balmy emotions soured, atrophied, shriveled up and blew away in the chilling late December wind, and she was reduced to a quarter-pound of cheese and roast beef.


Drip. Drip. Drip. Later that night in the bathroom the hot water refused to shut completely. Even when she twisted the knob firmly to the left a thin trickle of water dribbled out of the spout. Prying the plastic cap off the top of the knob with a Phillips screwdriver, she loosened the set screw, lifting the handle away altogether.

No luck! Only the metal stem protruded from the chrome housing. The defective washer was buried on the underside of the unit with no apparent access. Replacing the handle, she went to bed.

*****

Friday morning Ronda found a message on her answering machine.

This is the last day we can hold
the Debbie Macomber book you
requested before making it readily
available to our general readership.

Respectfully,
The circulation desk
Brandenberg Public Library

* * * * *

At eleven o’clock an elderly lady slipped on a patch of black ice in the Supersaver parking lot. An ambulance had to be called and accident report filled out. After lunch, Ronda sat down – an impromptu meeting – with the New England regional buyer regarding a new distributor for cosmetics. Certain hair care products were being discontinued and a line of new items required shelf space.

The Debbie Macomber book. She made a mental note to swing by the library on her way home. Otherwise, the new release would go back on the shelves. At two in the afternoon, Dwight Epstein stuck his head in the door. “Got a minute?”

Ronda shoved a pile of invoices aside and stared frigidly at the youth. Even his appearance was offensive. Overly tall and disjointed, he seemed ill at ease in his ungainly body. The blond hair sat like a bushy mop on his massive head. Ronda doubted he owned a toothbrush much less a comb.

“Yes, Dwight?”

“I was pretty upset when you promoted Scotty. Not that he ain’t a nice enough guy, but, properly understood, I got seniority and what’s fair is fair.”

The previous week Dwight forgot to change the setting on his labeling machine and priced kiwi fruit at half the normal cost. Five hundred kiwi flew out the door before one of the girls at the checkout counter realized what was happening. “As other management openings come available we will keep your name in the mix,” Ronda said. She didn’t bother to explain that placing someone’s name in the running didn’t mean the person received special consideration.

“When do you think that’ll be?”

“Don’t know, Dwight. But you have got to understand that promotions are based on merit. You have to bring certain personal skills to the workplace or it’s just the Peter Principle.”

His rheumy eyes clouded over. “Peter what?”

An unfortunate slip of the tongue. She wasn’t about to explain the facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. “When we find a job that’s more suited to your particular talents,” Ronda parried the question, “we can sit down and talk.”

“Yeah, well I hope it ain’t too long. I sure as heck like produce, but I’m not gonna wait around twiddling my thumbs.” The youth shambled out the door. After Dwight was gone Ronda continued to stare morosely at the open doorway for a good half a minute longer.

No other employee at the Supersaver market would have dared talk to her in that tone. Ronda had slogged away ten solid years in the trenches before the promotion to assistant manager. And for that she was eternally grateful. Humbled!

What was it with these addle-brained kids? They expected—no, demanded—a standing ovation for arriving to work on time. No need to serve apprenticeships, to work as journeymen perfecting skills. No, it was Dwight Epstein’s manifest destiny to start at the top!

The facetious proposition that employees in an organization tend to be promoted until they reach their level of incompetence. At a Supersaver management seminar held the previous year in Boca Raton, the guest speaker discussed long term costs to businesses when key employees quit and went elsewhere. The company frittered away skill, talent, intelligence, leadership. Intangible assets to be sure, but ones that could mean the difference between a run-of-the-mill store and a truly great place to work.

Democracy was the great equalizer. It leveled the playing field for dolts like Dwight Epstein threatening to dumb everyone down to a uniformed mediocrity. But that would never happen while Ronda was assistant manager. She viewed herself as a benevolent autocrat. Fair. Dispassionate. An unbiased decision maker. The Peter Principle be damned, she would make sure, that Dwight Epstein’s long-term future at Supersaver reflected the man’s intrinsic worth to the company.

*****

A scheduling glitch in the deli department kept Ronda at work till past seven. She drove straight for the library A massive building constructed of granite blocks, the Brandenberg Library was originally built in eighteen sixty-five. When it was renovated a few years back, the architect cleverly arranged to retain many of the building’s original features. The vestibule in the entryway sported an elaborate mosaic design, the tile imported from Genoa. Mahogany wainscoting wrapped around the walls with a matching gingerbread trim nearer the ceiling.

Only a few yards from the circulation desk, she pulled up dead in her tracks. In a reading room off the periodical section, Scotty Bergeron was hunkered down at an oak table. A hardcover book lay open in front of him. Half a minute passed. Reaching up with his right hand he flipped to the next page but only briefly before lowering it back where it originally lay.

Moving quietly forward, Ronda went directly to the circulation desk. “You’re holding a book for me.”

“Name please.” Before she could reply the front door flew open as though smashed by a battering ram and a bearded man in his early sixties staggered into the library. Disheveled with matted hair and glassy eyes, he spun about unsteadily. Almost from the moment the fellow appeared, the air reeked of cheap booze and rancid body odor.

“Excuse me.” The librarian stepped out from behind the counter. “I’ll have to ask you to leave.” She spoke in a papery-thin officious tone.

“That so?” The man’s mouth sagged open and his eyes gawked about the room without focusing on any particular object.

“You’re obviously drunk,” her voice rose to a strained falsetto, “and this is totally unacceptable.”

“I’m drunk and you’re a pain in the ass, but I don’t hold that against you.”

The drunk staggered off in the direction of the stairwell leading up to the second floor landing where the children’s’ books were located, but before he reached the first riser a sturdy hand snaked around the man’s shoulder pulling him back. “Hey, Frankie.”

The fellow blinked twice then draped both arms around Scotty Bergeron’s waist in a fierce bear hug. “Didn’t expect to see you here.”

“It’s getting late,” Scotty said, “and the library closing in fifteen minutes.” Propping the man upright, he coaxed the drunk back toward the foyer of the building. “Might as well head out together.”

When they were gone, the librarian noted, “That’s a sad case. The man served in Vietnam during the late sixties. Came back from the war all screwed up. Frankie Manning. His name shows up on the police blotter at least twice a month for disorderly conduct, drunkenness, loitering. He finds his way in here at least a couple of times each month. We just call the police and they swing by to collect him.”

“Does he live local?”

“The Veterans Administration got him a place over at Chelmsford Arms.”

Chelmsford Arms – a glamorous name for low-rent housing, mostly one bedroom efficiency apartments over on the east side of town that catered to welfare types, recovering alcoholics and younger people on disability pensions. Scotty Bergeron lived there, which would explain how he was on familiar terms with the bearded man. But Scotty certainly wasn’t a down-and-outer. So why was he renting in a crappy flophouse, consorting with mentally defectives and the likes of Frankie Manning? Nothing made any sense.

“I can help you now.” Having returned to her post behind the circulation desk, the receptionist was gesturing at Ronda.

She didn’t hear a word the woman said. Rather, her eyes were drawn to the quarter-sawn, white oak table in the reading room where a bulky text lay open. A woman with a toddler in tow pushed past her and deposited a load of children’s books on the polished counter. Ronda meandered unobtrusively into the reading room where she collected the abandoned text, tucking it in the crook of her left arm.

“Wittgenstein,” the librarian pressed a date stamp onto a paper flap pasted to the inside cover, “will be due back in three weeks.”

“Excuse me?” In her haste, she hadn’t even bothered to glance at the title.

The librarian pointed at the bulky tome Ronda was holding. “Your philosophy book.”

*****

Ronda rushed home, took a quick shower and brushed her teeth. Drip. Drip. Drip. The pitter-patter of tepid water even more insistent now, the leaky bathroom faucet had noticeably worsened. She’d call her plumber in the morning.

Ronda massaged an Oil of Olay moisturizer into the crow’s feet feathering the outer edges of her eyes. The woman first noticed the unflattering filigree when she hit the big three-0. In a mild panic, she bought Frownies—packaged all-natural strips impregnated with a secret revitalizing emollient— that she plastered on either side of her face at night before going to bed. The rational was that the strips would ‘retrain’ the facial muscles, help the aging tissue regain its youthful vigor and firmness. One day in late August as she was driving to work, the assistant manager glanced in the rearview mirror and spied a beige strip of tape dangling from her right cheek. Later that evening, she threw the Frownies box along with a full three-week supply of rejuvenating strips in the trash.

In her prime, Ronda Wickford had always been reasonably attractive. High cheekbones and a dainty chin were framed by a swirl of jet black hair. It didn’t matter if she let the dense strands cascade down to the small of her back or nipped them in a jaunty pageboy. Either way, the effect was stunning. Now the aristocratic cheekbones had settled like a slightly tipsy structure searching for bedrock. And the irresistibly cute chin had a mate that Ronda brushed away each morning with various shades of powdery cosmetics.

* * * * *

The book Scotty was hunched over in the reading room of the Brandenberg Public Library was a collection of essays discussing the linguistic philosopher, Ludwig Wittgenstein.


Facts exist in what Wittgenstein calls "logical space" Logical space is effectively the realm of everything that is logically possible. For instance, though it is not true that Toronto is the capital of Canada, there is nothing illogical about supposing that it might be, so its possibility exists in logical space. Some items in logical space (for instance, "Ottawa is the capital of Canada") are true, while some items in logical space are false. True or false, everything in logical space is possible. "Love is purple" is not an item in logical space, because it is not logically possible (love is not the kind of thing to which we can ascribe a color).

“Linguistic theory is nuts!” Ronda fumed. “Pure and simple.”

Love was not something that could be assigned a color. Sure, that made sense. But in life, nothing was ever what it seemed to be. Love could make a jilted soul feel blue with misery or blood red with homicidal rage. So how did the human heart factor into the equation? Or did the illustrious Herr Professor Wittgenstein conveniently ignore that ephemeral organ?

The world is "the totality of facts, not of things", which is to say the world is the totality of lit light bulbs, not of power sources.

“Okay,” Ronda mused. “That’s a bit hard to digest but perfectly manageable.” Sitting alone in your comfy condo thinking about sex was not quite the same as what Wittgenstein might describe as “the totality of facts’, which was a rather insipid way of saying that fornication - raunchy, hedonistic, libidinous sex - had distinct physical and emotional advantages over its cerebral counterpart.

The phone rang. It was her mother. “Yes, I still have plans for Christmas.” The conversation limped along for another fifteen minutes. Ronda’s father needed a hernia repair. Nothing serious. The doctor would schedule him sometime after the beginning of the year. Married Thirty-five years, Aunt Thelma was considering divorce. She wanted a new life. A few years shy of social security and Medicare, Aunt Thelma wanted to reinvent herself - ditch Uncle Morty with his smelly cigars and penchant for soft porn videos. According to Thelma, he rented at least three or four a week from the cable TV network.

So you give you not-so-perfect spouse the bum’s rush. For what? To end up in a one-bedroom condo with a refrigerator stocked with quarter pound bags of stale deli meats and cheeses? Nobody bothered to enlighten Aunt Thelma that sometimes, according to Wittgenstein, true love is not an item in logical space.


Signs are given meaning through their use in propositions, so it follows that if a sign is used in two different ways we are actually dealing with two different signs. For instance, the "is" in "John is tall" is different from the "is" in "John is the captain of the guard."


Ronda Wickford “is” the current manager of the Brandenberg Supersaver Grocery Mart. That very same Ronda “is” also an unmitigated idiot who drove to the library for the sole purpose of picking up Debbie Macomber’s latest bestseller, but brought home the Wittgenstein compendium.

*****

“Scotty Bergeron – where’s he live?” Rhonda tried to affect an unassuming tone. Not that she didn’t already know the answer.

Marna who was running a stack of forms through the copier, looked up. “That cheesy factory complex that was renovated into affordable housing off Busby Street.” She snapped her fingers together, a repetitive motion, trying to conjure up the name.

“Chelmsford Arms,” Ronda volunteered.

“Why the sudden interest?”

Ronda told her about the incident at the library.

Marna removed the original from the copier, adding it to the pile. “Can’t hardly imagine,” she mused, “why a guy like Scotty would be schmoozing with mental defectives and stumblebums.”

“Probably saved the drunk a trip to the pokey.” Ronda left the office and went directly to the produce department. A pimply-faced teenager was sorting five-pound bags of Idaho potatoes. “Where’s Scotty?”

“Out on the loading dock. Eighteen wheeler just pulled in.”

Ronda doubled back to the office to grab her coat. The temperature overnight had dropped to sixteen degrees with a wind chill of minus two. Out on the loading platform she found the truck pulled up snug to the cement platform with the rear door ajar. Scotty Bergeron was examining a bill of lading, while Dwight pulled cardboard boxes and thin wooden crates from a tall stack buried deep in the bowels of the container.

“You taught philosophy at the community college in Minnesota?” Puffs of steamy air like miniature clouds escaped her mouth as she spoke.

Scotty glanced at her distractedly then turned to Dwight. “What’s in those boxes?”

Dwight pulled back on a two-wheeler stacked chest-high with a green leafy vegetable. “Lettuce,” he mumbled, obviously unhappy with the extreme weather. “Romaine.”

Scotty kneeled down on the muddy bed of the truck and tore an emerald-colored leaf from one of the boxes. “That’s escarole not romaine.” He penciled a notation on the bill of lading.

“Yeah, I knew that,” the youth shot back indignantly.

Staggering forward under the heavy load, Dwight headed off in the direction of the warehouse. When he was gone, Scotty turned to Ronda. “Yes, I taught philosophy. Epistemology was my specialty.”

“Which is?”

“From the Greek episteme, knowledge. The study of the nature, sources and limits of knowledge.”

“Quite a mouthful,” Ronda remarked with a dry smile. “So what are you doing out here on the loading platform with the likes of Dwight Epstein, when you could be in a toasty warm classroom ministering to fawning graduate students.”

The man hauled down a column of boxes with similar markings, stacking the produce off to one side. Dwight returned looking utterly morose. Scotty loaded up the two-wheeler then helped him tip the hand cart at a sharp angle. Ronda noted that the boy’s jacket was much too thin for the frigid New England weather.

“In a warped sort of way,” he finally replied after making another entry on the paperwork, “dealing with Dwight presents even more of a challenge than a classroom full of precocious preppies.”

Ronda felt her brain going numbed, as much from the bone-chilling dampness in the carcass of the container truck as the pointless conversation. She stamped her feet vainly trying to restore some semblance of circulation to the frozen flesh. “My bathroom faucet leaks.”

“How’s that?”

Ronda told him about the incessant drip and how she had tried to fix it. When she finished Scotty said, “The damaged washer sits below on the underside of the unit.”

Putting the clipboard aside, he disappeared into the warehouse and returned momentarily with a vise grip. “Lock this onto the rectangular base and ease the wrench counterclockwise to break the seal.” “The rubber washer will be seated on the bottom of the shaft. Make sure that when you - ”

Before he could finish Dwight returned dragging the two-wheeler haphazardly behind him. “I’m going on break,” he muttered.

“Yes, that’s fine. There isn’t that much left. We can finish with it after.” Dwight shambled off.

“Right is tight. Left is loose. Just remember that. When you free the washer unit just take it to a hardware store so they can match up the replacement.” “Now let’s get out of here.” Scott tucked the pencil behind his right ear and moved toward the protective warmth of the warehouse.

*****

After lunch Ronda called the Borders book store at the Emerald Square Mall. “The new Debbie Macomber novel. I was wondering - ”

“Yes,” the salesgirl cut her off in mid-sentence. “A very hot item!”

“Could you please put a copy aside for me.”

“That won’t be necessary. We have dozens on display in the front of the store and boxes more in the back room.”

“Yes, I’m sure you do,” she returned curtly. “My name is Ronda Wickford. Please put one aside at customer service, and I’ll be by to get it shortly after five.”

As she was hanging up the phone, Scotty appeared. “Here’s the invoice from that eighteen wheeler.” He laid the paperwork on her desk. “By the way, make sure to shut off the water supply before you loosen the faucet.”

“I didn’t when I removed the handle and nothing leaked.”

The man scratched an earlobe. “ That’s because the water pressure is below the housing.”

Ronda felt her cheeks flush. “And where do I find the water supply?”

“Under the sink you’ll see a pair of shut-off valve.” Scotty nodded and went back to his department.

Epistemology. The study of the nature, sources and limits of knowledge. Knowing about the water supply lines – an innocuous detail – had just averted a potential disaster.

* * * * *

Saturday afternoon Ronda tackled the leaky sink. Removing the handle, she studied the chrome base. A raised rectangular piece of metal snaked around the rusty stem. She adjusted the vise grip until it was mated to the protruding section and locked the wrench in place.

Shut the plumbing supply line! Dear God! She almost forgot the most important step. Ronda dropped down on her haunches and fished about under the sink, locating the valves. Right is tight, left is loose. She shut both hot and cold for good measure.

Gripping the vise grip with both hands, she pushed back to the left. Nothing budged. She leaned into the fitting with all her weight, but the tool didn’t moved, not even a fraction of an inch. On the third try, she felt a subtle give, a relenting of some pent up tension in the mechanism and the threaded tubing slid noiselessly in a circular direction.

Ronda felt a heady surge of adrenalin, an exuberant rush of joy. That was it! The unit was free. No need for additional leverage, she removed the vise grip and unscrewed the wobbly stem by hand. Lifting it free of the sink, she turned the grimy metal upside-down. Buried in the bottom of the stem was a badly bruised and disfigured rubber washer.


At the hardware store, a willowy sales clerk - he couldn’t have been much older than Ronda’s fifteen year old nephew - replaced the damaged washer. “That’ll be a quarter.”

“A quarter?” Ronda fumbled with her change purse. “Somehow I thought it would be more expensive.”

The skinny boy smiled good-naturedly. “It’s just a rubber washer, lady.”

“I noticed that the one you sold me is thicker and shaped differently.”

The boy leaned across the counter. “Your old washer was probably the same thickness when new.” He ran a finger over the outside edge of the new purchase. “The convex shape is just an improved design.”

The world is "the totality of facts, not of things", which is to say the world is the totality of lit light bulbs, not of power sources.

Later that night as she was getting ready for bed, a revelation occurred to Ronda. The properly functioning bathroom sink resembled a lit light bulb in that something had to happen in the finite, real world before the abstraction of a damaged washer was resolved. Now, not only did the water shut off completely, but the unnerving drip, drip, drip ceased altogether long before the handle reached to the far side of the sink. Ludwig Wittgenstein, may he rest in peace, could surely have seen the humor in that.

*****

“Won’t need this anymore.” Ronda handed Scotty back the vise grips.

“How did you make out?”

She told him about fixing the sink. “What type of philosophy did you specialize in?”

“Wrote my dissertation on linguistics, but I also gave several courses each year on logical positivism. “

“That’s a mouthful.”

“Logical positivism asserts that all we can ever truly know are things grasped immediately with any of the five sense.”

Ronda picked a Bartlett pear from the bin and raised it to eye level. “It you see it, feel it, taste it, the thing exists.”

Scotty smirked then patted his chapped hands lightly in silent applause. “The statement, ten thousand angels can dance on the head of a pin, may be an interesting from a theoretical standpoint but is nothing more than a priori truth and unverifiable.”

“Santa Clause lives at the North Pole,” Ronda offered.

Scotty’s smile broadened. “Funny you should bring that up this time of the year.” His expression grew more sober. “The logical positivists would suggest that both statements are frivolous because they can’t be proven, but there’s an inherent flaw with their own argument.”

“Which is?”

“The foundation of their philosophical system is built on an a similar a priori abstraction.”

Ronda’s brain fogged over. “You’re losing me.”

“According to the logical positivists, only that which can be verified empirically by one or more of the five senses is real.”

“Yes, you already said that.”

“The statement: ‘Only that which can be validated by one or more of the five senses is real.’ is an abstraction no better or worse than the one about angels dancing on the head of a pin.”

*****

For Christmas Ronda visited the Pit Stop Diner in downtown Brandenberg. No reservations required. Also, no fear of running into any of her coworkers or neighbors from the condo complex. They would all be at home with family or away visiting friends.

Except for a few elderly who had hobbled over from the senior high-rise, the diner was empty. The place smelled of fresh-baked turkey, mulled cider and sweet potatoes. Ronda slid onto a stool at the counter. A waitress approached, arranging silverware, and placing a glass of water on the Formica counter.

“The holiday special will be fine.” Ronda handed the menu back to the woman. The door opened and the bearded veteran who had staggered into the library the previous week lingered in the entryway. He looked sober and physically pulled together, but then it was only twelve-thirty. Scanning the room, his eyes came to rest on Ronda sitting at the counter.

“You mind?” He slid onto the stool directly to her left.

“No, not all.” The food arrived and she lowered her head.

“Don’t make no trouble, Frankie,” the waitress spoke with mock severity. “I got my eye on you.”

“It’s Christmas,” he returned in a soft, even tone. “I ain’t in no trouble making mood.” She took his order and went off to the kitchen.

Jekyll and Hyde. The Vietnam vet with his elbows resting easily on the counter was not the same wild man flailing about in the Brandenberg Library. His flannel shirt and Docker slacks were perfectly clean if somewhat wrinkled, and the only disagreeable odor emanating from his body was stale tobacco. “I remember you from somewhere but can’t put a time or a place on it.”

“The Brandenberg Library last Friday night.” Ronda sliced a piece of turkey breast, dipped it in the brown gravy and raised the fork to her mouth.

The man groaned and ran a calloused hand over his face. “Not one of my better nights.” The waitress returned with coffee.

“As I vaguely remember, a friend had to help me home.”

“Scotty Bergeron,” Ronda replied.

He gawked at her in mild surprise. “You know Scotty?”

“We work together at the market.”

The man nodded and sipped at the coffee. The waitress returned and placed his dinner on the counter. Hunching over the steamy food, Frankie Manning turned his full attention to Christmas dinner and didn’t say another word until the plate was empty, the last streak of gravy wiped away with the remnants of a buttered bun. “Too bad about Scotty’s wife,” he said shaking his head with a somber expression.

The casual remark caught Ronda off guard. “He’s widowed but I’m not familiar with the details.”

“Hit and run. Some joker in a half-ton pickup ran her down like a stray dog.”

“How awful.”

“DUI. It was the guy’s eighth offense. After the funeral, Scotty took a leave of absence from the university. Hardly ever left the house.”

“The college sent a chaplain over to visit. God’s appointed servant was spouting some moronic nonsense about how it was divine destiny that the poor woman got mangled and how Scotty ought to come to terms with the senseless tragedy.” He cleared his throat and fixed Ronda with a malicious grin. “Then the chaplain began preaching some gobbledygook about being washed in the blood of the lamb, and that’s when Scotty sort of lost it.”

“Lost it?”

“Went ballistic and wiped the living room floor with the Catholic cleric.” Pulling a wallet from his shirt pocket, Frankie peeled several bills from a clump and placed them on the counter next to his plate. “When he got out of the hospital, the priest didn’t press charges. A month later Scotty sold his three-bedroom colonial and moved east.” He gulped down the last of the coffee. “Don’t you just love a story with a happy ending,” The vet rose and turned to leave.

“Merry Christmas,” Ronda finally blurted. “And all the best in the New Year!”

“Ditto.”

*****

On Wednesday of the following week a woman from the deli counter announced that she was pregnant and going out on maternity leave the middle of June. There would be ample time to recruit and train a replacement. In the late afternoon one of the part-timers, a high school girl, had an anxiety attack, hyperventilating and sobbing uncontrollably. On Christmas day shortly after passing out presents, the girl’s parents announced they were getting divorced. Happy Holiday! Ronda made her lie down on a sofa in the employee lounge and breath into a paper bag, while she called the girl’s mother.

At dusk snow started falling. The weather channel was predicting a little over a foot of heavy white stuff by midnight. Ronda had just renewed the contract with the plowing company. They would wait until closing when the parking lot emptied out to begin the clean up.

Dwight Epstein stopped by “Any news?”

Ronda, who was typing up some notes for an administrative staff meeting, withdrew her fingers from the keyboard. “Last Wednesday you didn’t showed up for work,” she replied icily, “and never called in your absence. That’s the third time in as many months you’ve dropped off the radar screen with no reasonable explanation.”

“Grandmother died,” he mumbled with a hurt expression.

“Which one?”

“What?”

“Was that your father’s or you mother’s parent?”

Dwayne began to fidget, rubbing his hands on the side of his hips. His features clouded over. He poked his tongue in the left side of his mouth causing the cheek to bulge freakishly. “Mother’s.”

Ronda tapped the snooze button on the computer keyboard and watched the screen fade to black. In no great hurry, she rose and drifted over to the file cabinet, extracting a manila folder. Pulling a half sheet of paper from the folder, she waved it in front of Dwight’s nose. “Says here you took bereavement time on February eighteenth of last year because your mother’s mother passed away.”

“Not so!” he muttered indignantly. “Someone must of screwed up the message.”

“Last Wednesdays, we had to pull Trudy Rabinowitz from dairy to help Scotty keep his shelves stocked.” What she didn’t bother to mention was that Scotty was so impressed with the girl that he asked if Ronda might consider transferring Dwight elsewhere and letting him keep Trudy permanently in produce.

Yes, Ronda would do just that!

With an inch-thick wad of letters of reprimand in Dwight’s folder, the assistant manager could ‘transfer’ Dwight straight to unemployment, tell him to clear out his locker and vacate the premises without the least concern that he would ever collect a penny of benefits from unemployment.

*****

“That nice Jewish girl, Trudy, is moving to produce the middle of next month.”

Scotty ran his pricing gun over a row of prepackaged sliced mushrooms. “Then you found another job for Dwight.”

“A position that uniquely suits him,” Ronda confirmed. “Got any plans for Christmas?”

“The holiday has come and gone,” Scotty corrected her. “I think you might be off by the better part of a week.”

“Not necessarily.” Ronda stepped closer and tapped him on the forearm. “According to Wittgenstein, facts exist in ‘logical space’, which is the realm of everything that is logically possible.”

Scotty, who was holding a blue carton of mushrooms, put the vegetables aside and didn’t respond for a good long time. “Yes, that’s so.”

“For instance,” Ronda continued, “though it is not true that Toronto is the capital of Canada, there is nothing illogical about supposing that it might be at some future time.”

“I think I can see where this is going.” The words tumbled from his lips in slow motion.

“If I were to cook a teriyaki pork tenderloin roast with baked potatoes, an apple, cranberry and butternut squash casserole along with bourbon glazed panettone topped with whipped cream, then January second - not the twenty-fifth of December could be the bearded fat man in the red suit’s special day.”

“Christmas in January.” There was a look in his eyes she had never seen before. A subtle relenting, like when the vise grip slipped effortlessly to the left and the unnerving task was done. Scotty picked up the price gun and slapped a barrage of ivory stickers on the next row of packaged mushrooms. “I’ll bring the wine.”

---