Walkabouts
It's another day of the campus walkabout.
Walking about the campus, 2 km a full round in the slapabout March wind, learns you about people you know and people you would not regularly know. It's a regular wandering academic grove, the brainy Birnham wood on the move. And I am part of it. Striking leads to bonding and bonding leads to friendship? I am not counting on it. I do not count on continuity, though it is simulated enough by the routine chore of picketing buffeted by wind, rain and generally March in all of its fickleness.
We tread carefully so as not to step on college property even as I learn the details of the perimeter, the cigarette butts stamped into the sod around the bus stop, the discarded bottles in the bare orchard, the black and white pillow rolled around the lawn by the wind, the graffitti on the plaque stone that never got the plaque because it arrived with a misspelling that someone noticed.
You learn a lot about topography as you walk. About.
People tell you tales that they might not regularly tell because there is time to tell them. Sometimes you walk past the TTC crew that is welding the rusted rails it means to set into somewhere and the pounding of the generators mutes the sound of voices declaring, explaining, sharing. But I do wonder will these people respect me in the morning? Melanie says, it's the kind of conversations you have when you are drunk. Similarly, I learn the names and I learn their stories. Stories of spiteful tiresome parents and brilliant children, breakups and screwups, minor and major, debts and desires, thinly veiled. Will they respect me in the morning? The conversation will continue, but that depends.
That depends on whether they will remember that they told me and what they told me in between sharp gusts of wind and sun.
And that's my epiphany. Most of the time people do not remember what they told you unless they are ashamed of it in the morning. Then they either forget that they told you or they do not talk to you. They cork it up again, force the wind right back into the bottle like a misbehaved genie, and toss the bottle away to land in the grass. They wont admit that it is theirs.
It remains to be seen how many of them will not be anxious to remember what they have told me and what they expect I might remember, and more importantly, know about them.
In a sense I am a post a secret blog.
Walking about the campus, 2 km a full round in the slapabout March wind, learns you about people you know and people you would not regularly know. It's a regular wandering academic grove, the brainy Birnham wood on the move. And I am part of it. Striking leads to bonding and bonding leads to friendship? I am not counting on it. I do not count on continuity, though it is simulated enough by the routine chore of picketing buffeted by wind, rain and generally March in all of its fickleness.
We tread carefully so as not to step on college property even as I learn the details of the perimeter, the cigarette butts stamped into the sod around the bus stop, the discarded bottles in the bare orchard, the black and white pillow rolled around the lawn by the wind, the graffitti on the plaque stone that never got the plaque because it arrived with a misspelling that someone noticed.
You learn a lot about topography as you walk. About.
People tell you tales that they might not regularly tell because there is time to tell them. Sometimes you walk past the TTC crew that is welding the rusted rails it means to set into somewhere and the pounding of the generators mutes the sound of voices declaring, explaining, sharing. But I do wonder will these people respect me in the morning? Melanie says, it's the kind of conversations you have when you are drunk. Similarly, I learn the names and I learn their stories. Stories of spiteful tiresome parents and brilliant children, breakups and screwups, minor and major, debts and desires, thinly veiled. Will they respect me in the morning? The conversation will continue, but that depends.
That depends on whether they will remember that they told me and what they told me in between sharp gusts of wind and sun.
And that's my epiphany. Most of the time people do not remember what they told you unless they are ashamed of it in the morning. Then they either forget that they told you or they do not talk to you. They cork it up again, force the wind right back into the bottle like a misbehaved genie, and toss the bottle away to land in the grass. They wont admit that it is theirs.
It remains to be seen how many of them will not be anxious to remember what they have told me and what they expect I might remember, and more importantly, know about them.
In a sense I am a post a secret blog.
posted by EvaB at 8:06 PM
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