Do you see why I left?
Mercury McMurtry. It’s like some dumb nickname a commentator gives to a college football player.
My real name though …
Agatha Trent Mercury McMurtry.
I suppose I could go by Agatha, but in the year 2024, say that name and all people think about is Christie. No slouch when it comes to company, I grant you, but it still sounds like your crotchety grandmother known for rattling around her dusty Victorian and falling over her walker when it gets caught on the throw rugs.
I think not.
I went by Trent for a minute, when I was in seventh grade at Middle Valley Junior High. I thought it was chic and mysterious, that it would score guys just at the thought – a girl named Trent. Really all they thought was that I was probably a lesbian and wouldn’t put out. So, you know, RIP Trent.
I was left with Mercury.
My English teacher told me it was a great name for a reporter, and, he said, because he was a failed one having not endeared himself to the newsroom in his native Atlantic City, he’d know. It was those bland details about being in newsrooms that stayed with him.
What a freakin’ idiot.
Being the impressionable youth I was at the time, I have to say, I was influenced and started down the road toward a journalism career. I loved writing. It was the only way I could hear myself think. He took me under his wing, made me editor of the paper. I never knew why but came to learn over lunch many years later, that his married, sad, pathetic self had the hots for me. When I was in high school.
So very cringey. I mean, ew.
Thankfully, I went a different direction – forensics, psychology, and criminal justice. Boston University and beautiful Back Bay was perfect. Got the hell out of Middle Valley and met a prince of a man. I mean, literally, a prince.
I mean, a Prince. With a capital “P.”
Prince Lindholm Ludwig Vincent Fryer, second cousin to the Royal Family of Liechtenstein. I’m not sure why I’m capitalizing the “Royal Family” part, but whatever. You get it. He’s rich, he’s kind, he does things.
He has a boat.
To this day, after 14 years of happiness and love, I’m still unclear why he felt the need to slum it at BU when someone of his stature could have gone to Oxford or Harvard or some other super-insulated place where he’d have security and body guards and detail. Instead, he found his way to Orkney Street in Brighton, five housemates living, as it turned out, below my walk-up where I was with three girlfriends.
We were actually closer to Boston College than BU, so the competition for the laundry facilities was fierce … no one had washer / driers in the homes. We had to drag the laundry down to the street, along the sidewalk and, in my case, around the corner to the coin-op. My procedure was always to put the laundry in, walk down the street to Cityside Tavern, have a beer, walk back to the coin-op, move the laundry to the drier, then go get another beer.
It was on that second beer on that fateful Tuesday night that I met him.
I could tell he was a nerd immediately. A Red Sox hat (when in Rome, he said to me later) sat backwards on his head. He was drinking Sam Adams. (I mean, seriously. In Boston? No. Harpoon, Trillium, Dorchester, yes. But not Sam.)
The only seat left at that point was next to him. I had the bartender slide my tab down to that seat as she hadn’t, as promised, saved my seat.
Gently, I guided him toward the Trillium. He listened. I was floored.
And that’s the name of that tune.
No man in Middle Valley had ever listened to me for any reason, nor had they listened to my beloved mother – a mother who, in spite of what you, dear reader, may have read to date, has all of her faculties. She is someone with great integrity who likes to sip a little. So what, I ask you? Who is hurting as a result? Certainly not the Riverside and that horrible Cassie woman.
Anyway, I’m back, against my will but I know my mom is in need.
Or at least that’s my passing story for being here – for mom.
Really I think this Sheriff Paul is a hack, has it in for my mother and others, and I think I’m the only one to prove it.
Forensics and all.
I think Mother would have preferred grandchildren to me being here, the wife of a prince, literally.
But, hey, you take what you get in this life.
Gunnar Olafsson