Found Art

 
Be it accident or intention, student papers are funny sometimes, and I’m assigning credit here, not fault.

It’s a grind, the Student Life.

How to survive? Yet another paper? Yet another deadline? Lofty and lowly expectations fused, asunder! Totally forgotten.

What else to do? You stick to the facts:
 

[Margaret] Mead was a woman who wore capes, was flamboyant, and although maimed at one point, had a lesbian affair with Ruth Benedict (2^nd year Anthropology paper circa 2007 ).[1]

When you’re this big, they stamp you.

 
A+
 

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[1] Although I cite this, there is everything in me that keeps on wishing it were I who had the power to write it. Awkwardly tensed, confused sentences aside. Astride…?

Social Mediations

 
My aunt recently joined social media and it is slowly becoming the defining feature of what remains our somewhat shaky, tenuous-but-working-on-it relationship. Really.

It’s complicated.

My aunt has always been more of a senior sister to me: still young enough to be relatable, but just older enough as to throw scandalous suspicion on our outings together. You know.

A “cool mom” type.

Lorelei Gilmore.

Ideal.

But.

We drifted apart as I grew older, and she grew still older. The reasons were mostly philosophical in nature but damn real nevertheless.  I fought for them, back in the day.  I really did.

Given the chance, I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way.  Though way less swears probably would have helped.

It’s a shame.

Anyway…

… slowly, slowly, we began to reconnect, memory and emotion dulled and blunted by the passing of time, time, time.

And now she wants to be my “Friend”.

When “always” also means “why not?”

When we see each other, that’s almost all she ever asks me now: “Why don’t you ‘Friend’ me? Why don’t you ‘Friend’ me?” A simple request that’s simple enough.

And yet I hesitate, my natural inclination being to question motive. To cross-examine expectations. To scrutinize hearts evidently on sleeves.  You’d be surprised.

Still…

Social media is exciting to the newly initiated for as long as it stays that way. When you start, you want the instant gratification that comes with having/pursuing/generating LOTS of it, and the more the merrier etc., etc., etc. That could be about all she’s after. I, then, would be incidental and that kind of works for me.

On the other hand…

Perhaps her request is really just a ploy to gain access to information she can pick and choose from, information that admittedly, yes, OK. I put out there in the first place but I can’t possibly be expected to remember absolutely everything that I say that I do and think when I post can I? Point is. She’ll know some Things, which means I’ll have to assume she knows All the Things, and it won’t really matter that I won’t  or can’t ever really know what she really knows. You know?

Then again…

It may be that she really wants to get to know me and is using what’s available because that’s just where we’re at right now, and given our history, well, that’s progress?  Even though the me she will get to know will be the me that I want to be known or at least hope to be known or at the very least want to be seen as because there’s not much else involved than that right there when it comes right down to it.

So, is that good enough?  And is it a starting point or a finishing line?  A means or an end?

It could be better than nothing.
 

The Kindness of Strangers

 
I get greetings in the street all the time and this, I’ve long accepted, is not an outcome of anything specific to my being as a person, nor does it have much to do with my being as a person as it pertains to being a person walking in the street as the greetings happen overwhelmingly whenever I’m out walking with Lou.

To be completely honest about it, the greetings are overwhelmingly for Lou with – at most – a few offhand hellos and hi theres for me. I am oddly appreciative of this, since it at least relieves me of that great social burden of Small Talk with Strangers. I get to be less polite; I get away with a not insignificant rebuff of my own.

Nothing or nothing much for me?  Moving right on along!

Tit for tat.

Lou was with me the day at the Farmer’s Market with the encounter with The Man.

The St. Jacobs Farmer’s Market is a well-kept affair, refuge to bleary-eyed suburbanites, their dogs and children alike.  It’s a fine place to take the in-laws, if they’ve never been there before or haven’t been there for a Good Long Time.

It is a quaint but not without a certain flair; quaint, but not unassuming.

A double negative kind of place, with a petting zoo and buggy rides in the summer and year-round kettle corn.

You can get kale there, and baby chickens.

Handicrafts.

Meat and cheese.  Sorry.  Meats and cheeses.

TUBS OF SAUCE? You know, you can get those too.

The Man was seated just outside the food court doors on a decorative, undoubtedly handcrafted bench.  He was clutching a bag of dog treats (you can get those at the Market too!) and scanning the passersby with his big, watery eyes. He saw Lou as we walked by and said hello to Lou, and as he said his hello to Lou, he reached deep into the bag, extracted one brown toasted treat and offered it to Lou, stopping just shy of Lou’s inquisitive doggy nose. It was a fluid, graceful motion, a well-practised almost instinct.

Seamless.

Lou backed away from the Man’s outstretched arm and open hand and retreated to his fallback position behind my legs. We backed away from him, intentions clear.

But the Man was not deterred.

Head up, big, watery eyes set to motion again, scanning, scanning, Lou and Lou’s rejection apparently totally forgotten, it didn’t take The Man long to find them: other dogs, other owners, many of whom were at first rather pleased by the attention and then rather perplexed by the situation.

For the Man, he had dog biscuits, LOTS of dog biscuits (possibly even expensive ones), but no dog.  Neither doggy hide nor doggy hair.

          Not.

A.

          One.

And no words spared for human ears; none so much as wasted.  He addressed the dogs and the dogs alone with man-sized, childish glee – “Hello little boy! Hello big girl! You a good doggy, hmmm?” – big watery eyes lighting up, for instance, when a little brown and white shih tzu pulled violently away from its wary owner and accepted a biscuit with manners that even by dog standards seemed voracious and sloppy.

The dog was happy, the man was happy, the owner, who knows? I was happy Lou refused the biscuit.

Which leads me to wonder.

How many inevitable rejections occurred that day? And for whom?

But for whom?

Looking at it from all sides, I cannot not conclude that that depends on who was really in control after all.

Dogs and all.

The nose knows.