Simple Matters With Intimates

 

Who knows what I looked like?  I was in my own world, walking in an elongated rectangle to points north and south of my parked bicycle, stooped over, looking into the bush beside the road.  Two guys in fancy cycling gear rode by swiftly and one of them asked authoritatively: “Are you OK?”  I suppose it’s been a while since anyone’s asked me that.  “Huh?  Yeah.  I’m fine.” I replied, trying to sound cool, but suddenly feeling infantilized.  It didn’t really matter.  They were already long gone. 

 

I’d racked up about seven hundred species on this Seek app over the course of the last eighteen months.  Finding “new” things is slow going these days.  Indeed, when it identifies something ‘new’ my first impulse is to assume it's wrong.  This is probably a misidentification.  Still, the process is a good memory exercise.  I assume I know that plant is a Solomon’s seal or a flea bane.  Collecting the new is secondary now, to properly learn all the things I’ve already found. 

Why do we lose our patience so easily with our loved ones?  I have infinite patience for tiresome strangers or tertiary acquaintances but I lose my cool with on simple matters with intimates.  We were in line at Lowes and I’d gotten a few things, she’d gotten a few things among which were some big bags of fertilizer.  The cart standing the requisite six-feet in front of us was without a customer.  I eyed the people at the counter who were finishing up.  If they finish and this person isn’t back I’m going to steer this cart around and head right up.  I will.  I will.  Caught in this infantile loop, I was surprised when my wife asked me to head outside and get two twenty-pound bags of mulch.   “The brown ones.”   Off I went and when I returned she calmly suggested that these were not the brown ones.  These were the red ones. 

Frustrated, I insisted that these were the ONLY brown ones, rather more feistily than I should have.  Now she was annoyed.  I had raised my voice in public, which may as well have been whispered profanity in Chinese culture.  She’d lost face.  I’d lost face.  The family had lost face.  Our ancestors were no doubt suffering from this as well.  I went back and of course, she was right.  There was a third pile of brown bags and I got two.  By the time I returned my wife had walked off to the car and the lady in front of me, her cart now brimming over had returned, just in time and she moved her cart to the cashier.

 

 

 

Monday, 05/17/21