SEPTEMBER 23, 2020 – When I worked at First Bank, now USBank, I had a boss whose name was Jim Roberts. One of my co-workers called him “Jim Bob” for short. Pretty soon, we all called Jim, “Jim Bob,” though never to his face.
Jim Bob was a good boss—smart, effective, trustworthy, affable. We got along well, and he sent me work after I returned to the law practice. One day he called and invited me to lunch—it’d been awhile since we’d met in person. I met him at noon at the luncheon café of the Minneapolis Club.
I hardly recognized him. He’d slimmed down considerably and gushed about his new diet, which allowed him to lose major weight and still have a hamburger for lunch twice a week. He called it “the program” and continued talking about it after we’d been seated. He proselytized continuously as I tried to study the menu and explained further over the course of our meal. It occurred to me that he’d invited me to lunch so I could see for myself the success of “the program.” I was duly impressed.
I was also impressed by the volume of condiments that Jim Bob put on his burger. As he raised the sauced-up hamburger to his mouth, a dollop of bright yellow mustard slipped out and landed on the upper end of his new, blue tie. “Swedish colors,” is what first entered my mind.
Jim Bob didn’t notice. He was too focused on moving his jaws to overpower the burger and to tell me what a pleasure it was “to have the freedom to load up two days a week.”
By this time the highly stylized Swedish flag had morphed into a slow-motion replay of a downhill skier in a yellow racing suit falling and sliding down a bend in the run . . . er, tie (the lower end had been tucked into his shirt pocket) . . . to where a snow fence should have been placed. The skier, making bright yellow tracks was heading straight off the course and into . . . deep powder—Jim Bob’s white dress shirt.
I didn’t know what to do. Jim Bob was clearly enjoying his own monologue, oblivious to the mishap that was ruining the upper half of his tie. I didn’t want to stare at the sliding mustard, but on the other hand, I was curious as to where it would wind up—on his white shirt or his suit pants. Surely, I had a duty to save Jim Bob from a cleaning bill for shirt and trousers. The tie had been a lost cause the moment he’d sunk his teeth into the burger.
But then Jim Bob saved himself. He happened to look down a second before the sliding mustard-colored skier would’ve slipped off the blue run.
“Goddamn!” said Jim Bob as he yanked his napkin off his lap and to the rescue in the nick of time.
“Oh geez!” I said, relieved that only the tie would be going to the cleaners.
(Remember to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email.)
© 2020 by Eric Nilsson
