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Ménage à trois

A mixture of three! Ah, those French!
That is such a delicate way of speaking
of three people living together in a sexual relationship!
But let us, here, speak more generally of three people
simply being together for whatever reason.

Mari and I have just returned from the States of Washington and Oregon.
We visited Becky and Stan somewhere up a creek in Washington,
and Daniel on a hill and bottomed out in Portland, Oregon.
Stan is my brother, and Daniel is my step-son.

We rented a car in Seattle, and drove up into the Cascades,
and then down to Portland and back. While in Portland,
I took up residence in the back seat of our god-awful, little
Dodge Caliber. It is a damned noisy little bugger,
but that drawback is offset by its impossible sight-lines.

Daniel either drove, or sat in the front passenger seat
because he knew, often, sometimes, where we were going.
And--I say this entirely seriously--he and his mother
needed every moment to trade anecdotes and information:
it had been months since they have been together.

I heard almost nothing comprehensible except the road noise.
I spent a lot of time thinking about mixtures of three.
Had there been four people in the car, we would have had
two conversations. Three people together is a project.

In three-people dormitory rooms, there is almost inevitablly
a closer relationship between two of the people,
and the third is often, non-maliciously, a bit on the outside.
The same thing often happens in work teams.

I came to the conclusion that it was time for me to abandon
my teenage fantasy about how fine a ménage à trois would be.
It is fitting that I came to that conclusion in the back seat of a rental car.

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