I just came back from church last night, and barely b4 I dropped my work clothes and head to my kitchen to cook a delicious pot of jollof rice for my two friends who’ve been visiting with me, I got a shocker that I least expected. Like a subdued and powerless defendant, I had no attorney on my side to raise plausible objections that could tilt the case to my favour. Seemingly sobered by the seriousness of their tone and inflections of their voices, I had no option than to grant the interview…or rather have myself be quizzed by two bros whom I had breakfast with b4 I rushed off to work. They didn’t know what stress i faced at work…only for me to get back home and have the case file displayed on my reading desk…even though I had hoped to begin work on some write-ups whose deadlines I had failed to meet. But what could be more pressing and sensitive an issue to a guy who’s growing older and older by d day than this inevitable question…’When will you marry, Felix? ‘ and it’s not as though one is singing an Indian ballad which Julius Agwu popularized thro his musicomedy pioneer album when kids asked him…’when will you marry?
So my two friends summoned me to the soap box in my own bedroom…and read out the charges against me! And they had all the evidence and facts and alibi to nail me ranging from …photographs of all the female faces in my album…not knowing that all are not ‘girl friends’ but I also had a sizeable number of my relatives, sisters, nieces and cousins who they saw as ‘probables”…how mistaken assumptions can be…But that didn’t help my case…and I was baraged with questions and punches from my two friends who meant good though! My hobby as a photographer and portraitor and ‘collector’ of photographs worsened my case. From my campus fellowship days in
Maybe if I had no camera, or had no mementos of the past, I would have been discharged and acquitted, but that wasn’t my experience. Possibly, they could have commuted my sentence to a lighter punishment and verbal spanking if the evidences were undeniably a collection of farce…but na so I was found guilty..!
And after it all…the recurring question was: So when are you getting married? Enough of all these excuses of mistakes made in the past, and failed attempts at relationships…but I also had the opportunity of asking my ‘interviewer’ who just left Bible school and is going into full time ministry…So when are you getting married yourself? cos he’s very single…and now has been wondering how he’d do restitution to three ladies he’d proposed to previously who seemingly said no, but just when he got into a new relationship, the ladies who once said NO… are either giving him a yes or have turned the seemingly red light to an amber that has almost turned green, and he’s wondering how he’d resolve this issue since he’s head over heels with someone new in Abuja…whom he’s exploring, and it was another pastor friend of his that did the matchmaking…yet he had the audacity to bring me to the soap box in my own bedroom!
And it reminded me of the article written by Vera and I had a good laugh, being amused by the paradoxes and realities of life of which we ain’t immune from…
