I have long since forgotten the woman’s name. I just remember that she worked in the ladies’ fashion section of a clothing store and had a blue rinse in her hair. Whenever Mother went in the store, she always asked for the woman I call “Madame Blue Hair.” I had never seen anyone with blue hair before, and asked Mother about it. She explained that the woman used a blue rinse in her hair because she liked it. “And” she added, “if she is happy about it, then I am tickled to death for her. You are not to ask her any questions or say anything.” It took a few decades to figure out what she meant and gave a variation on the theme of tolerance.
That is more than could be said about Mr. V. He taught math when Father was a boy, and like me, Father was left-handed. Mr. V brought a twelve-inch ruler down across his knuckles every time Dad held a pencil in the “wrong” hand. Over half a century later Mr. V was demoted to working as the commandant of the junior high study hall, and was still whacking anyone left-handed, and shouting at them. That was a variation on the theme of intolerance.
In Woody Allen’s wonderful film, Midnight in Paris, his main character Gil Pender does a bit of time-traveling through Paris. Every evening when he steps into an old yellow Peugeot, he is transported back to the 1920s. He gets to spend time with Hemingway, Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Matisse, Brunel Dali, Fitzgerald, Ray Man, and a few others. Not a bad group with whom to keep company. But whenever he was asked too many questions, Pender smiled and said, “I’m just visiting.”
I understand the meaning of those words, because more and more, I feel like I am just visiting; just passing through. I am less and less certain that I belong here. There are a lot of things I do not understand, and I am not even certain I want to invest what time I have left trying to understand most of them One of them is coffee, of which I wrote a week or so ago. Growing up, coffee was that black hot liquid that smelled like well-ripened roadkill. Some two decades ago I had my first cup, realized I liked it, and I have been making up for lost time. I buy the cheap dark roast stuff that some morning still smells like well-ripened roadkill, probably of the skunk variety.
What I cannot understand is all of the thought, hemming, hawing, and dithering that goes into ordering a cup of coffee. Some customers all but break out their Rand McNally, debating whether they should go for Indonesia or Ethiopia, and discuss the political climate in each region, debate the water’s ph balance, chemical enhancements, and the company that shipped it. After that they begin to debate accessories to add to it. I swear, any day now they will want to know the name of the person picking the beans and the well-being of his or her family. I know, it’s the “experience” they are after, but I don’t understand it. I do not share their personal connection with a cup of coffee. I think if someone asks whether or not a person wants coffee, it can be answered in two or three words – yes please or no thank you. But if someone wants to spend their perfectly good money on some exotic coffee drink, and it makes them happy, I’m tickled to death for them. I still don’t understand it, perhaps because I am from the Woolworth’s lunch counter era where choices were strictly limited.
Another thing that leaves me reeling is all the confusion of gender and human sexuality. My generation had it summed up for us by a British comedy called “No Sex Please, We’re British.” As kids, we left the ‘mushy stuff’ to the adults and were bewildered by what they saw in it. In high school we had a dress code that mandated women in dresses or skirts, men in trousers. We had no difficulty figuring out who should be using which restroom. A few of my women classmates got into trouble by wearing white eye shadow. It didn’t seem like such a big deal that they should get detention or suspended for it.
The way I see it, we are all a bit different, and things work best when we acknowledge it and then get on with living. It is a futile battle to try making the world change to accommodate us. My best friend in school was also left-handed, but our parents did not tell the principal or the school board that we wanted half of the doors and water fountains left-handed-accessible. No one offered us an emotional support animal. The same thing applied when someone discovered we were lousy at reading, writing, and terrible at spelling. Of course, we were. We were not just left-handed; the two of us were left-handed dyslexics. We figured out how to work around it. Once we did, we always had our noses in books.
Still another reason I’m beginning to wonder if I should accept I am better off as a long-term visitor, what with all these divisions and bickering over everything – politics, climate change (or is it global warming? I can never remember), and political correctness and cancel culture. Being perpetually politically correct seems as difficult as trying to hit a moving target while blindfolded. A long-time friend from Minnesota responded to the quest for being politically correct and advised, “Well, don’t give it much thought. At our age we are becoming irrelevant, so just sit back and enjoy watching what’s happening and go be eccentric.”
It appears to me that instead of bridging gaps between people or what we now call ‘communities’ we are making matters worse by pointing out the differences between us. If you like Frank Sinatra, and the person next to you likes rap, and I like Paul Whiteman, it isn’t a political statement, and leave any thought of cancel culture out of it. It does not have to be a ranking of which musician or type of music is good or bad, or a hierarchy. We just like our type of music.
As long as you aren’t hurting yourself or anyone else, then Mother was right: “If you are happy, I’m tickled to death.”