It started too early, as usual, with the Rose Parade on TV. Rachel, a normally peppy person anyway, was bubbling over with extra enthusiasm on this particular morning, oppressing poor Lyle with the most exciting details of the day's menu and guest list even as he struggled to get enough circulation moving through his chronically numb and sleeping right foot to begin hobbling gingerly around the bed and into the master bathroom to relieve his bloated bladder.

Dutifully, she had brought coffee to him in the living room, where he sat sleepily rubbing his upper eye sockets with his palms, hoping that Joe Garagiola, that geriatric warrior of the commentator's booth, would say something, anything, beyond the same inane old parade coverage pap that Lyle heard every year on this date.

Perhaps if Garagiola talked about something out of the ordinary, Lyle could find reason to tune his mind in on the tube and out of the muddled mixture of half-remembered scenes and statements from last night's party at his brother's. Sheepishly Lyle admitted to himself now that he alone had turned the affair into an excuse for a drunken binge, as if alcohol and contrived merriment could somehow rinse away the gritty residue from his everyday life experiences over the past thirty-odd years of adulthood. Lately he was experiencing an overwhelming urge to strip off the encrustment that compromise and expediency had caked like barnacles upon the inner walls of his self, an obscurement which had started when he was a young man just beginning to heed the lifelong obligation of grabbing every fast buck that presented itself.

In more recent years the accumulation of inner crud had accelerated as Lyle assumed the civic leadership roles which by default fell to anyone diligent, tenacious, or just dumb-lucky enough to keep his financial head above water in such a small community as Catfield for a reasonably long while. As such, further fast-buckmaking opportunity had befallen Lyle, and no matter how well-intentioned, no matter how judicious on behalf of the public interest he had ever sought to be -- first, merely as a member of his Lodge but later, and more conflictingly, as chair of the local industrial commission and eventually as an entrenched member of the city council -- Lyle always seemed to find himself casting an affirmative vote that wound up creating more business for his brothers' and uncles' construction companies and hence for his own equipment rental yard.

It wasn't that Lyle didn't believe in avoiding conflicts of interest. Heaven only knew that if he lived someplace bigger he would do so at all costs. In Boise he certainly would. Even in a somewhat smaller community -- say a Caldwell or a Nampa -- he could manage to perform the public a service without somehow enriching himself or his cronies. But Catfield wasn't like those places. It was a more vulnerable little burg of only 5,000 or so souls. Here high ethical principles were an unaffordable luxury and the so-called personal conflicts of interest represented nothing worse than the very grease that kept this town's gears from seizing up completely.

Or so Lyle Kyles reasoned whenever he got to brooding over these matters, something he was doing more lately than he would prefer. For this and for other reasons, Lyle had allowed himelf to more freely imbibe last night than he otherwise would have.

He had gotten drunk, but good wife Rachel had not. New Year's Eve, after all, was by unspoken but well-established convention in their marriage the time for getting together with Lyle's family, so if Lyle wanted to tie one on then, so be it; she wouldn't be so inclined to drink, however, not only because she wasn't much of a drinker, but more so because she was determined to preserve her high state of energy for New Year's Day proper, the couple's conventional time for gathering with her relatives.

So there she was in the morning, purposeful, fulfilled, humming the tune of some song Lyle couldn't exactly place beyond remembering that it was one he did not like. He, as always, held back from complaining to his wife about something she was doing that he did not like. He sipped the hot black coffee she had given him and inwardly remarked how glad he was that his head didn't actually hurt. He just felt fatigued, that's all.

It turned out that the fatigue factor was nearly ruinous enough in itself though. When the wife's relations began arriving, Lyle found it a strain just to keep up his end of the pleasantly bland conversation he was obliged to provide everybody in the living room while good wife Rachel went humming blithely along toward completion of her labors in the kitchen.

Lyle silently thanked God for the televised bowl games, in which he today feigned uncharacteristically keen interest, exclaiming noisily over every score, fumble, and pass completion, using them all as opportunities to stunt the growth of conversation among the relatives. Had Rachel's folks been people of higher mental capacity, they no doubt would have detected the ruse, but it worked reasonably well for Lyle until the good wife finally entered to announce that supper was on. From that point forward, her guests were all hers to entertain.

Catfielder Fortunes will resume after the following MESSAGES