Buttoned up

I shake the principal’s hand but clam up and don’t introduce myself, starstruck I guess, and then file in behind others to the auditorium and a seat comfortably in the back. A couple comes in at the very end and takes the two seats in front of me. He is waiting for her to sit down and she is waiting for him to read her mind and take the water bottle and papers from her hand so she can remove her jacket. My jacket is still on, buttoned up and everything. The first speaker has a gravelly, high pitched voice and the second speaker is smooth baritone, but peppered with uhs and ums. The third speaker is just right, but implies our children should be taking Advanced Placement Calculus and Physics. He must be talking to the raven-haired mom two rows ahead, who nods vigorously. I drift off and count gray heads in the crowd. Two gray ladies, just like me, one stylishly cut with cute glasses and the other with long straight hair and ruddy cheeks of a young girl that somehow makes me think ‘older woman’. I spot a man I remember from AA meetings a million years ago. His hair isn’t really gray and he wouldn’t remember me. I imagine plucking these three from their seats so we could meet afterwards and I would say what was all that nonsense about AP Calculus, hm?

This is something I wrote in the spirit of Homework for Life, which I mentioned late last year. It has failed to freeze time like it does in movies so that I can run around and tweak the noses of people I do not care for, but I am enjoying the practice. Every morning when I journal, I take something from the day before and turn it into a mini story or byte. We literally have stories all over the place and it helps me to stay present by looking for the details there. Like, in the above sequence, I not only remember the woman who couldn’t sit down because she was holding a water bottle and wearing a jacket, but I also remember how sheepish her husband looked when he finally did read her mind. I remember he was wearing a belt holster for his phone like it was 1999. He had a fuzzy haircut like a baby chick. I remember another woman three rows up who was chewing gum so distractingly I decided maybe I shouldn’t chew gum at all.

Right now my homework for life tends to be snarky, and this worries me a little. Snarkiness is fear-based, and maybe I should have chosen Fear as my word-of-the-year because I am able to poke at it with a stick through exercises like this. Time and Fear wait for no man, and so they are hard to slow down to get a really good look. I like being able to go back and get a closer look in these tiny, frozen snapshots.