Last week, I happened to phone my nameless faceless national financial institution with a question about my statement. Don’t ask me how or why, but I had a conversation about chickens with the nice lady who took my call. Not eating them, but taking the eggs out from under a broody hen (which I’ve done so often in the past that I devised an ingenious method for staying un-pecked—which received tremendous admiration from the nice lady, who hadn’t thought of it before.)
Yesterday, in a shop, I got into another conversation which started out about a clock and ended up about the 12 cats and four dogs for whom the saleswoman was about to cook Thanksgiving dinner, of which only two cats and one dog were hers.
Does this happen to you?
I was going to write about personalities, about the angry French man who jabbers away in French at the gym. (A French-Canadian friend told me that the man does nothing but bag on women.) There’s a Russian lady there whose eyebrows go up and meet in the middle, making an upside down V, when she asks, “How are you?” with tragic sympathy--- though I’m always cheerful around her as a matter of policy. A genial Thai man makes corny jokes that are indecipherable because of his accent, though the good-naturedness comes right through so I know to smile and chuckle no matter what I think he’s saying.
Personalities are only part of the equation. We all live inside the solitude of our minds, some of us are more okay with this than others. This blog, in itself, is an act of outreach. You stalwart few who read it often see what I’m thinking, what I should by all the laws of politeness keep inside my skull but I don’t. Instead, I smear it over my bit of cyberspace for us to talk about when we meet, or speak, or just email. At least, unlike the financial lady, I don’t go on about chicken plucking. Yuck.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
hmmm...no, i think we see an edited, well-crafted, intentional version of what you are, or MIGHT be, thinking. that's not the same as seeing/reading what you're thinking. if we all thought in as orderly and clever a fashion as you write...well, the world would be different. nuf said.
Post a Comment