I woke up at something like 6AM, had the last bit of sake and went back to bed until around noon. What a life!
Since there's so much less socializing, I find I'm being nicer to people I do get to socialize with. I wear my mask 100% when outside, even when huffing and puffing on my bike. It's not necessary, but I care about other people and want to set a good example. I haven't cussed at a driver in ages; instead I've been working out ways to work with the way traffic works and find the best place to be in the flow. And for every nasty driver there are at least a few nice ones and most are indifferent.
We have nice conversations in Nijiya Market. Blondie was at the till yesterday, and asked me what's the news. I told him not much, but Oh wait, part of highway 1 is washed out, as in gone, at Big Sur. I told him there's some great drone footage to be found, then since he apparently didn't know about Reddit, I wrote out the URL for reddit r/bayarea. "Oh, I know about Reddit", he then said. Funny guy. I have the impression he's sort of searching for a political orientation that works for him, and I want to make sure he doesn't become a rightist. I fell for that garbage when I was around his age...
But another funny thing yesterday ... I was riding along 5th to visit one of the little free libraries and there was a nice desk and what I wasn't sure was a microwave or a toaster oven sitting on it, out by the curb. So I pulled in to have a look. A guy who looked kind of like a cleaned-up Kurt Cobain was sitting on the steps of the house there, and said, "Oh, it's called for, I'm just waiting for the guy" in a friendly tone. I said I didn't need a "Chef Mike" anyway, but was thinking maybe it was a toaster oven. "But, toaster ovens are cheap anyway, you can get a good one for 30 bucks new". It was all very friendly and I wished him a good weekend.
It's fun to be nice to people! I don't know what was wrong with my mother but she couldn't seem to keep any friends. She seemed to be very paranoid and taught us to "never invite yourself to someone else's house" and "never ask, wait to be asked" and so on. And the truth is, kids invite themselves to other kids' houses all the time. "Let's go to your house!" and if it's really not OK, then the other kid says "Nah, I can''t because..." and that's fine too.
Maybe Mom's paranoia was the safest way to live as a brown person. Go to other kids' houses much and you'd get blamed for anything that went missing. Get invited for dinner and endure the scowls of your host's parents and know he got a dressing-down afterward. I remember taking a Black friend of mine - a pretty solidly middle-class and intellectual guy who I think works for the NSA now - to my Grand-Aunt Mary's place and the temperature in the room dropped instantly. "Aunt Mary" as we called her was my father's aunt and painfully WASP, even had one of those horrible crucifix things hanging right over her bed. I don't remember my mom ever going to Aunt Mary's. We kids went. But I can't recall Mom and Aunt Mary ever talking face-to-face.
Oldest sister told me Mom wanted to volunteer to go door-to-door for the March Of Dimes and was told she was too brown to be acceptable. Mom's been mistaken for the hired help. Mom, in Hawaii, never got a traffic ticket despite teaching herself how to drive in her 40s, and driving without a license or insurance or even a safety inspection (I'd paint a fake inspection sticker) because in Hawaii she looked local. She'd probably still be alive is she'd stayed there.
These days I try to get plenty of sun.
No comments:
Post a Comment