I was in a distracted frame of mind, doing errands, oblivious to breathing, walking and daylight. I pushed through the door of Grove Market and stood aside for an elderly woman approaching the entrance. She looked at the sign below the handle of the door I'd just come through and read it: No backpacks or dogs allowed inside. She looked up at me and said, "No backpacks, dogs, or..." and pointed at me and bathed me in a smile. I looked at her beaming there, her white hair and hunched body. The smile trumped everything, and then turned into a quick little giggle. Charmed, I was sent somewhere else, and I stayed there all day.
I had seen the twinkling little girl smiling from her dried-apple face. Her dark eyes twinkled and danced; she wore a red jacket, some strands of her white hair fluttered like little flags. Her smile teased its sister out of me, over and over.
Another day, I was sitting at my table where sat a vase holding a chrysanthemum from a friend's garden. I was writing checks, paying bills, crossing items off my list. All of a sudden, every single petal on the flower landed with a soft plop on the tabletop, heaping up in a small pink pile. Just like that. It's the only thing I remember from the day, the sudden odd event, the abrupt demise of something that seconds before had been a picture of delicate perfection.
Odder, weirder things have happened spontaneously, fatefully, and without warning. You wonder all sorts of things -- probably the best result of unpredictable small events. A shift in reality, a spark, maybe just the spark you'd been missing in the day nudges you out of boredom, dullness or complacency to a new realm where your imagination plays. Surprise springs from nowhere, shakes us back to alertness and out of the descent to a bleak, dull existence. Long may we play.
Posts
2 comments:
The street is quiet in the minimal town. Mary sits facing the window across the table from her two grown daughters in a quaint cafe with real oil paintings on the walls. She wears a pink cotton shirt under a double knit, snap fronted sweater stitched with a machine embroidered floral border. Her eldest daughter orders Mary's lunch from the menu, choosing the cafe's acclaimed roasted eggplant sandwich. Mary looks up from beneath her crop of frost white hair, flattened on the back and one side, looks with clear blue eyes into the waitress's face and says, "She ordered my lunch for me because I don't speak English." The waitress, who has just told Mary she is a lovely woman, shuts her mouth, pauses, walks away. The two daughters glance at their impish mother. They grin. The youngest daughter says of her sister, "She's bossy." "I'm bossy," the other sister says, and her dark eyes tell the truth; she is pleased with herself. Mary, glancing at her surroundings, trusts that they know what they're doing, that they'll handle the bill. She quietly continues to enjoy what her eyes see in the place. A large, epic painting in baroque style shows a tyrannosaurus rex peering over the tree tops at a clearing in the forest where a picnicking group of white wigged ladies in stays and ruffles have just noticed the monster and are rushing to their feet. Out on the street, perhaps a car has come and gone. Another slips into a parking spot.
-ss
But what about Flotilla?
Post a Comment