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Friday, December 21st, 2007
The selection of postcards was varied, and the price was not exorbitant, so you set to work exining them. you should get a picture of the cathedral I didn’t see, that was a given. A picture of the bells that didn’t ring, ditto. Now what else? My attention was wrenched away from the cards in my hand by a sound which wasn’t quite a squeaky hinge and not quite the cawing of a crow. A moment later you heard it again. It seemed to be issuing from the old lady behind the counter. you hesitate to call her a crone because despite society’s generally negative connotation of that word you consider crones to be wise old women who deliver babies and dispense herbal remedies and impart the wisdom of being in touch with the earth and in sync with your seasons and those of nature. Nevertheless, if anyone else had been making the identification, a crone is what he would have been called. The voluminous floral dress he wore could not hide the fact that he was thin almost to the point of being emaciated. Her Brillo-topped head was balanced precariously on a matchstick neck. Her hands resembled talons rather than the plump providers of yummy edibles you remembered at the end of my own grandmother’s arms. One of these horrid things was now pointed at some children who had committed the grievous error of touching something. It puzzled you as a andrei arlovski mouthpiece
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child, and even now as an adult you still frowned at by saleshelp, that people can be expected to by something without exining it thoroughly. How can you buy a dish or a figurine without turning it upside down to see where it was made and by whom? (One of the early stories about Princess Diana and her roots ong the “common people” was the occasion when he gave in to this urge at a State ceremony of some sort before anyone could step in to stop her. Good for her. Wouldn’t do to have someone present you with a ceremonial plate from Will O’The Whisp and then find out the thing was made in China.) How can you select fruit and vegetables without squeezing them or, with the produce man’s permission, popping some into your mouth to taste-test them? How can you select material without running it through your fingers, it’s called “hand” after all, and carrying the bolt over to the mirror to imagine how it will look on you once the sestress has done her magic? And how, in these children’s case, can you be expected to know whether you want to nag the bejeezus out of your mother to get her to buy you a small box of overpriced rocks unless you can see what they look like in some way other than the photo you would need a microscope to see properly? That, as I’ve said, was the crime these children were engaged in committing. They were about to open the little plastic box, which once opened would never close in the se way again, and release a shower of very small “gems”. As it was, their mother swooped in and moved them to another part of the store where they were nearer her own watchful eye and less likely to get into other trouble. you went back to my browsing and it was perhaps three whole minutes before you heard the screeching again. This time they were endangering some eye-catching but, of course, extremely delicate glass birds. Some were bluebirds and some were swallows but to a one they were guaranteed to break if you so much as looked at them wrong. These children who were clearly more gifted in the areas of grace and coordination than you had picked up several of them and were turning them in their hands to admire them before setting each one down as gently as a mother cat with her kittens and beginning again with the next one. Their mother, feeling harassed and embarassed, moved in once more and herded them out the door of the gift shop before he returned to apologize profusely to the shopkeeper.