’ ‘Come on, Lise,’ Alex said, ‘let’s go get that coffee.’ ‘OK,’ Lise said. A bit later Alex and Lise were sitting at a table in the co...rner of the hospital cafeteria. Alex looked across the table at his secretary, who’d just finished telling him her story and was wiping her eyes with a napkin. ‘I wish you’d have told me what was going on earlier, Lise,’ he said. ‘Maybe I could have done something to save you all the aggravation you and Luke went through this morning.’ ‘I…I wasn’t sure anyone. She wasn't the blue-black of Nigerian ancestry. Rather, her bloodline appeared to have come from a mixture of races. Her fertile imagination had supplied that scenario as well. She imagined a slave holder, who looked a little like Rhett Butler, on some plantation, looking over a new shipment of slaves one day. His eye would have fallen on her great great grandmother, who was, no doubt, a tall, thin, well muscled woman from the Massai, used to walking or running long distances. She would have. ” She was perfectly aware that every teenaged boy had a mental list of “Moms I’d Like To Serve,” although she also knew that the more coarse version of the acronym substituted the word “Suck.”“It’s just I hadn’t heard anything since she went off to London. And, well, college has been suggesting I should start looking at sponsorships and I’d hoped that...”It was a problem every male faced on leaving college. He had to find someone that would accept him as their responsibility in law. With males. Over at his nightstand, he took a large pair of silver scissors from his top drawer there. He held them up for me to see fully, and stated very matter-of-factly in his wise-sounding deep voice, ‘These are Wiss Sheers. You are not going to find a better, more well-made pair of scissors than these anywhere in the world. They are made only for cutting material, so don’t ever use these on paper, OK, Les?’ ‘OK’ I vowed to him with my life, ‘never, Dad, I will never use them on paper.’ Dam, that.