Years ago, a friend of mine was teaching college English when she noted that one student wrote every essay on birds.
She suggested he write about something else. He said he couldn’t. “What,” he asked, “are you going to do with an idea that won’t let you go?”
The French have a name for this condition. It’s called an idee fixe. I knew a man who loved to talk about Cokes so much that during every visit he would get 15 minutes to declaim about Cokes: cherry Cokes, diet Cokes, new and old Cokes; cokes versus Pepsi.
Another man I knew was obsessed with Weber grills. He loved them so much that he tried to get my wife to cook a blueberry pie in one.
I also knew someone who was writing a Ph.D. thesis on a minor writer named Lord Herbert of Cherbury. He never finished his thesis, but he spoke incessantly of Lord Herbert.
I sometimes think that such people are lonely. The feel friendless but at least have a companion in birds, Cokes, Weber grills, or Lord Herbert of Cherbury. Yet all these people had friends, too. Maybe we just weren’t good enough.
As for myself, my only idee fixe is my new cat. I can’t decide whether to name him Weber or Lord Herbert. He laps up Coke and, of course, he’s very interested in birds.
This is Tom McBride, and that’s my Perspective.
