Revenge is best served...

from a distance

I’m on the Camino - doing the walking thing (see previous post). So while I’m gone, I’ll leave you with a story and haiku about someone who will remain nameless. Someone who shares my name, my house, and my anniversary. Someone who hasn’t fully appreciated my haiku-writing superpowers as much as I'd like him to. Someone who has it coming since my first haiku here on Substack when he responded with these immortal words (forever engraved on my memory bank and destined, at some future day, to pay a HUGE price for):

“I didn’t know it would have so many words! I thought a haiku was 3 lines? But this is SO long.”

You might can imagine my shock. But instead of instantly annihilating him, I chose the more holy option - to wait for the perfect time to get my revenge. Revenge is better served cold - and from a distance.

So now, since I’m halfway across the world at an undisclosed location on the Camino de Santiago, the time has come for my scheme of revenge to unfold. Mister, you will now pay for your ill-advised, non-supportive comment. (Did I say it was etched into my memory bank?) And the good news for you is that I only have 23 subscribers to this fledgling Substack account, so there’ll be hardly any witnesses to your humiliation. You can keep your dignity, for the most part. Of course the good news for me is that there WILL BE 23 WITNESSES to your humiliation!!

So let’s begin…. (cracking the knuckles as I pick up pen and begin to write)....

I remember a time when I was practicing for my Camino walk. It was a cold day - unusually cold for our area of Texas, and I was looking forward to my hike with my favorite gloves. The gloves I’ve used each winter for at least a dozen years. These gloves are like family. I know the left from the right so well I don’t even have to look to put them on. They just feel right 100% of the time. They are well broken-in like a good horse, or a good shoe, or a good man, and I protect them with fierce devotion. Life is good.

And then…you left town. I gave you a goodbye kiss, waved at you from the driveway, and wished you God-speed on your journey. Your man’s-journey, doing manly things.

Later that day, when the temperature reached barely above freezing, I was ready to take my hike. I looked for my life’s companions - my gloves - only to find they were missing. Nowhere to be found. They had disappeared, flown the coop, skedaddled. And it was in that horrible moment I realized my nameless man-enemy must have picked up my gloves from the counter instead of his own. My irreplaceable gloves. This man was now in complete possession of my almost-heirloom gloves.

Was it deliberate? A fiendish, diabolical scheme? Maybe. I’ll never know, but it was devastating, to say the least, as these particular gems are no longer made, and I had no hope that they’d ever find their way back to me. So I used my only weapon at hand - my pen - and wrote a haiku which I immediately posted on our family thread.

My Revenge Haiku

     Stealer of gloves, you're
     messing with my sanity.
     Cold hands and cold heart.

Unbelievably, I was reunited with my gloves when he came back, probably because of the family pressure he endured due to my haiku. (Haikus have power!) And now we’ve come full circle. I stole his favorite head-lamp for my Camino journey. He’s probably searching all over the house for it! That’ll teach him to take my haikus seriously from now on.