A Stranger Wandering Around

So, I’m on a conference call.  It’s a Microsoft room, not a Zoom bridge and so I’m less familiar with the interface.  But it’s going ok.  This is a call with folks in Brazil, China, and North Carolina and I’d guessed accurately that people are going to want to enable video for the call.  I’m prepared.  I’ve shaved, showered, my shaggy Covid locks are combed and under control and I even have a shirt with a collar on.  I can’t see anyone else, unless they speak.  But I can see myself.  I look serious.  I adjust the angle of my laptop once and then again to properly frame my face.  I knit my brows, to seem intent.  I notice that when I speak, I stare off in front of me, looking at nothing in particular, and I wonder what I look like, as for that moment, I can’t consider my visage. 

Other people talk.  My colleague talks.  He looks suitably professional.  He’s grown a beard.  Look at that.  His image, however, is soapy.  Is my image soapy?  Why is his image soapy?  Is he in a sun-drenched room?  Is there a film covering his lens?  I look quite sharp in the little thumbnail of myself.  I mute the voice button.  My camera remains on.  If this were simply an audio call, the likes of which I’ve already had six of, earlier today, I’d have just thrown it on mute unless I wanted to speak.  But I find myself musing about what it means to toggle off my image.  I try to remind myself that no one can see me unless I speak.  But, I’m not sure.   

My older one comes by and asks if I’m on a call.  Outside of the camera’s aperture, I snap my fingers and try to maintain a placid smile, facing forward.  Now I cut the video and the audio.  “Are you?”  “Yes darling.”  “I have a doctor’s appointment.”  “I can’t do that on-demand.  You need to plan ahead for that.  Talk to mom.”  I turn the video, the audio and my placid smile back on.  I hear my wife coming down the hall.  “Are you on a call?”  I repeat the process and confirm that I am.  She backs up out of the room, afraid of the camera’s vacuum.

And then something odd happens.  A middle-aged woman, a stranger, is walking across my yard about fifty yards down in front of me.  What . . . is she doing here?  She walks, and pauses, and continues, not looking up at the house.  I’m annoyed, and amused, and confused, and intrigued all at once.  My video is off, and I want to bring this person to my wife’s attention.  I yell “hey” aloud to notify here and realize that I was not on mute.  I mute immediately.  The flow of the conference has been interrupted.  “Did someone have a question?”  It must have been rather jarring, but I keep silent and after a few more seconds it passes.   I’m able now to tell my wife that there is a stranger wandering around in the far corner of the lawn and not long after I see the lady look up to where my wife must have engaged her from and nod and make her way back from whence, she came. 

I’m so used to observing nature from this perch; birds, insects, and groundhogs and foxes.  This is my first siting of a random human. 

Wednesday 07/22/20