The gathering

She was a lovely woman with a calm reassuring voice but there was something about her that told you she would of been first to drink the cool aid in Jonestown. A strange air about her as if her feet did not quiet touches the ground, so she never stood up for fear of falling. A Pensiveness and mannered movements betrayed her as someone with a mild psychiatric history, where bouts of medication had left their mark in a barely detectable stilting and freezing during considered speech. She was speaking gibberish of course a tongue she had learned well from a master no doubt.    

This left me with a feeling of deep unease that someone so innately good and seemingly controlled had such a character floor, what drove her to deeply trust in charlatanism was it some unbearable lose which did not diminish with the years, but grow as a cancer, or a deep melancholy which was always with her as if she had tapped into the deep under belly of this town and found it wanton. Did she not know how to process her own deep desires? Which had been touched upon by chance by the master of the dark arts of reading body reading and offering plausible lies sold as half truths to the willing? Or had the medication sunk all self recognition, so as to leave her a husk, a mere shell of the young well turned out girl she had once been.

No matters any of this, as such things must remain unknown or risk one’s own sanity. I am not immune to silver tongued lies, of tales of beatific visions for the realms beyond the senses. Though my profession does make me more qualified, than my fellow man to make such judgements for I see my fellow citizens at their most brittle, left without the hardened shells experience and sometimes torment will bring.

The woman to her left smiles demurely at the simply minded comments of the man sat with her. He is a tedious bore , who once thought himself progressive when young but like all aging has beens now sits in judgement of the young , who are not  as profound as him, lacking his schooling and sharp outlook developed in some alternate discipline. The truth is his outlook has not been sharp for decades; decaying senility has set in behind those bottle rim glasses, his aging mind as brittle and his bones. His arguments now lacking the charm which served him well in youth where he was the central figure in his social circle .Now his attitude serves only to cut him of further from his own humanity. He does not realize his asides wound deeply those within the family who no longer telephone. He grows more remote by the day living in some strange fantasy world where he is guru and demi god “if only people would listen”. At heart he means well but has become a living fossil, a catalogue of attitudes so out of step with the day. He no longer knows how to reach out and call another comrade and so this poor now woman suffers him.

Her husband long since dead, this aged fool is no burden to her really. She thinks him some misunderstood artisan and so is forgiving of his faults which after all are only human failing oft repeated and seldom avoided.

She is forgiving as she is wise and thinks on this. To keep ones counsel and yet give ear to the young without judgement, this is a difficult skill to master. Yet I once knew a wise old bird to whom it was second nature he grow up in a community where people truly listened and experience of tragedy when young, but this had not marred him but rather developed within him deep compassion which he was able to express in stories told always at a considered pace sometimes with a break for observation and comment. This man worked with his hands but his talent lay in storytelling, a side of him few knew being by nature a quite man.

Oh to be like this man when I am old she once thought, even if a pale shadow, a man of true worth, a man who is father in more than just name. A guide to young minds a teller of tall tales yes, but a man also a man who in his heart has lived them and urges you to live as he did, a life without regret and bitter judgement of one’s fellow man. For what is life if not for living? The merest of reaction to ones state with thoughts not you’re own and all around you things left unexamined and what kind of live is that? So she paints and whiles away the hours and sits and smiles and ponders at such gathering as this