After catching up with the news and the writing pieces
people wanted to share, we got down to business. We were introduced to Raymond Carver – not in person, you understand. He wrote short stories – short on the
fluffy stuff. Bare bones, if even that, the story we heard, “Why Don’t You Dance?” included no names, just the boy, the girl and the man and a roomful of bedroom
furniture arranged on the front lawn. No explanations of why it was there. The reader
is left to supply the details, make their own connections and jump to
conclusions.
We moved on to talk about things we had seen that seemed
out of place. One person talked about an army rucksack he spotted, leaning
against a wall. The plumage of a
pheasant was sticking out of the top and the smell was rancid. The bag and the
bird were just abandoned. Another person spoke of small pink bags filled with
doggy-do tied to the branches of a small bush. The bag was tied up with a neat
bow. Listening, someone suggested that it might not have been
doggy-do at all, but he heard about drugs transactions where the pink bags tied
to trees were used by drug pushers. Sometimes, however, a pink bag with
doggy-do is just that – a baby nappy bag standing in for the usual scooped
poop.
We had a few minutes to write up our own stories, real or
imagined, of finding things in places where they didn’t fit. Here’s mine…part
biographical.
“Four eyes!” The
insult lacked any kind of creativity but had followed me through every school
classroom and playground. I tried to point out that I didn’t have four eyes –
just two. Two eyes that did not work as well as most people.
It was the frames
that shamed me. Pink and plastic they announced my poverty to the world. They
were NHS frames with lenses not much thinner the bottom of a glass bottle. No
one ever commented on the colour of my eyes – hazel flecked with blue.
I wish I’d had the
courage to leave my glasses somewhere, hanging perhaps on a stretch of wire
fencing as I stumbled away half blind.
I did stumble for a while without glasses. They had got
broken. I was in the habit of slipping them under my pillow at night. Perhaps
the tooth fairy would take them away even though they looked nothing like a
tooth. Truth is there was no bedside table to place them on. They broke.
I was of the age where image mattered. Did I just simply
refuse to get another pair? Did I have a teenage girl’s hissy fit? I don’t
know. I know I never owned up to all the things I couldn’t see. I sat at the
front of the classroom not so I could see the board better but because I always
sat at the front. Seeing the writing on the board from the front of the class
was as much an impossibility as seeing it from the back.
My teenage years were a blur. Nothing to do with drugs or
alcohol consumption – just poor sight. I particularly remember a Christmas
party game at the local Mormon Church. I wasn’t a Mormon, but I was a Donny
Osmond fan flirting with Mormonism.
The game involved sitting in a circle. Someone winked at someone
else and swapped seats before the person chair-less in the middle of the circle
could find an empty seat. There was much winking going on but I never saw it
happen! They gave up on me after a while, thinking me a simple idiot that hadn’t
listened to, or understood, the instructions.
I came to my senses eventually and went back to the
opticians.
If only someone would wink at me now!
