When I was hiking in the mountains, I saw a man staring at a tree branch. “What do you see?” I asked. Excitedly, he pointed and said, “That’s the cocoon of a very rare (I don’t speak Latin). I looked where he was pointing and saw nothing, but not wanting to disappoint him, I said, “Wow! That’s really something,” and walked on.
Had I been on the mountain with Moses, I would not have said, “Moses, the sun is in your eyes.” If he saw a burning bush, who am I to deny his vision? After all, he did hike back down with a very good set of rules.
Someone once accused me of seeing people not as they are, but as I want them to be. Recently, I received an invitation to my 60th high school class reunion. The invitation intimated that if you are still alive you are encouraged to attend. The big incentive in the invitation was, “A prize will be given for the best decorated walker, cane or wheel chair.” I declined with a note saying, “You are all frozen in my memory as 18-year-old kids. Not a bad place to be!”
Notwithstanding, I have come to the conclusion that I see people the way they really are---not the way they pretend to be.
For instance, the toilet in my guest bathroom wouldn’t flush, so a man who pretended to be a plumber came to fix it. It took him no time at all to break the mechanism he had come to repair, and it took me no time at all to conclude that this man obviously placed dead last on his plumbing exams and probably never received his golden plunger at graduation.
The next two plumbers informed me that my first plumber “didn’t make it,” an obvious euphemism for “he was fired.” They then explained, in plumber talk, (along with a moving demonstration) the mistakes that my pretend plumber had made. Flushed with success, they left.
That evening my toilet performed a marvelous imitation of an airplane propeller. Now my guests can be seated and come in for a landing.
It just proves that you don’t have to wait for Christmas for the fruitcakes to arrive. It would not surprise me at all if these pretend plumbers matriculate later in life finding stimulating work on our missile defense system, because life is like that.
Esther Blumenfeld (Yes, I definitely see people the way they really are.)
CROSSING WITH THE BLUE LIGHT, Blumenfeld c. 2006