Overheard in KMart
One of my errands this afternoon brought me to KMart. I knew they had some stuff on sale, and they have a lower concentration of evil than Walmart or Target. I ended up scoring about $20 of kitchen stuff, and narrowly avoided scoring even more flannel shirts, even though I bought a ton of them at a different sale a few weeks ago. (Can one ever have too much flannel, though?)
While I was perusing the kitchen section, about at the point where the droning Christmas music was making me forget my own name, I heard the most unpleasant sound. It was the piercing caw of an older woman, looking for her husband.
"Arnold!* Where the hell did you go?"
I felt my ears bleeding, and imagined dogs whimpering, birds falling out of the sky dead, fillings coming loose in people's teeth, avalanches starting in distant mountains. I also figured I could make a guess why such a call might not achieve the desired result; Arnold was probably deaf if he had to listen to this voice, something like putting scraps of aluminum foil in a blender, on a regular basis. Thankfully, it did not last. But about five minutes later, I saw gruff older man slowly pushing a shopping cart past me.
"Gladys! Where did you wander off to? Damn woman."
I made a wild guess that I had located Arnold. His voice, in contrast, was deep, like a bulldog's. The thing is, his body language did not match his tone at all. He seemed more bemused than annoyed. In the moment it took me to take him in, I heard the distant answering shriek of Gladys a ways off, very faint. He, apparently, did not.
"I think I heard her that way," I said, pointing. Arnold shuffled off in the direction I pointed without a word to me. I continued trying to figure out which things I was going to buy while I heard Arnold gruffly calling for Gladys, who had stopped screeching in reply. Eventually I heard him speaking to one of the many customer servicebots floating around, describing her. The only bit that I caught was that she was using a walker.
A few moments later, I saw Gladys come around the corner, and they were reunited. Gladys was a tiny thing, with long stringy gray hair and very thick-lensed glasses on her bony nose. She was wearing a red Santa hat, the white ball at the tip obscuring her cheek as she pushed her walker. Arnold scolded her; apparently, she was supposed to wait for him by the DVDs, but she got bored and started wandering around looking for him because "you were taking too damn long."
In that moment, I changed my mind about her, and about them. I thought they were adorable. Their bickering reminded me of my grandparents; while one might read a transcript and think that they hated each other, their actual relationship was nothing of the kind. The electric charge one might expect to find behind the words, the malice, the anger, simply wasn't there. It was as harmless as the way two puppies snarl at each other while they play. I felt kind of privileged to witness this routine, this intimate dance they had probably been acting out for decades, probably laced with complex layers and subtexts that outsiders would never guess, that perhaps they have even forgotten, at least on a conscious level.
As corny as it sounds, I thought of Steve then, and imagined how we might seem in thirty years. The foundation is already there; we already have a secret language and inside jokes that have developed over the last eight years of living together. (I can totally see myself being the deaf one.) And whether this country ever comes to its senses about marriage equality, or we move to a country that already has (hi Canada!), I see our relationship, like so many other same-sex relationships, on a trajectory similar to that of Arnold and Gladys. Whether we ever get legally married or not, our relationship is what it is. And it's not, despite what some shrill deceitful homophobes preach, at all alien, or sinister, or dangerous.
I look forward to having that kind of intimacy with Steve as we grow older. I found myself a little bit ashamed that I'd immediately jumped to some snarky place about Gladys and her tinny, irritating voice. It makes me sad that we so often reduce the elderly to caricatures when often, they have great wisdom. Sometimes, we have to dig a little to find it, and it's not the kind of wisdom that can teach us how to work the latest smart phone, or navigate a store the size of a small country, or even select the correct lane from which to make a left turn. But there is real wisdom in older people, and in relationships like the one between Arnold and Gladys.
If you slow down, silence yourself, and listen carefully, you can hear it whispered between the lines of the script they recite to each other.
* Not their real names, partly because I don't remember them now, and partly because the real names are not important to this entry.
While I was perusing the kitchen section, about at the point where the droning Christmas music was making me forget my own name, I heard the most unpleasant sound. It was the piercing caw of an older woman, looking for her husband.
"Arnold!* Where the hell did you go?"
I felt my ears bleeding, and imagined dogs whimpering, birds falling out of the sky dead, fillings coming loose in people's teeth, avalanches starting in distant mountains. I also figured I could make a guess why such a call might not achieve the desired result; Arnold was probably deaf if he had to listen to this voice, something like putting scraps of aluminum foil in a blender, on a regular basis. Thankfully, it did not last. But about five minutes later, I saw gruff older man slowly pushing a shopping cart past me.
"Gladys! Where did you wander off to? Damn woman."
I made a wild guess that I had located Arnold. His voice, in contrast, was deep, like a bulldog's. The thing is, his body language did not match his tone at all. He seemed more bemused than annoyed. In the moment it took me to take him in, I heard the distant answering shriek of Gladys a ways off, very faint. He, apparently, did not.
"I think I heard her that way," I said, pointing. Arnold shuffled off in the direction I pointed without a word to me. I continued trying to figure out which things I was going to buy while I heard Arnold gruffly calling for Gladys, who had stopped screeching in reply. Eventually I heard him speaking to one of the many customer servicebots floating around, describing her. The only bit that I caught was that she was using a walker.
A few moments later, I saw Gladys come around the corner, and they were reunited. Gladys was a tiny thing, with long stringy gray hair and very thick-lensed glasses on her bony nose. She was wearing a red Santa hat, the white ball at the tip obscuring her cheek as she pushed her walker. Arnold scolded her; apparently, she was supposed to wait for him by the DVDs, but she got bored and started wandering around looking for him because "you were taking too damn long."
In that moment, I changed my mind about her, and about them. I thought they were adorable. Their bickering reminded me of my grandparents; while one might read a transcript and think that they hated each other, their actual relationship was nothing of the kind. The electric charge one might expect to find behind the words, the malice, the anger, simply wasn't there. It was as harmless as the way two puppies snarl at each other while they play. I felt kind of privileged to witness this routine, this intimate dance they had probably been acting out for decades, probably laced with complex layers and subtexts that outsiders would never guess, that perhaps they have even forgotten, at least on a conscious level.
As corny as it sounds, I thought of Steve then, and imagined how we might seem in thirty years. The foundation is already there; we already have a secret language and inside jokes that have developed over the last eight years of living together. (I can totally see myself being the deaf one.) And whether this country ever comes to its senses about marriage equality, or we move to a country that already has (hi Canada!), I see our relationship, like so many other same-sex relationships, on a trajectory similar to that of Arnold and Gladys. Whether we ever get legally married or not, our relationship is what it is. And it's not, despite what some shrill deceitful homophobes preach, at all alien, or sinister, or dangerous.
I look forward to having that kind of intimacy with Steve as we grow older. I found myself a little bit ashamed that I'd immediately jumped to some snarky place about Gladys and her tinny, irritating voice. It makes me sad that we so often reduce the elderly to caricatures when often, they have great wisdom. Sometimes, we have to dig a little to find it, and it's not the kind of wisdom that can teach us how to work the latest smart phone, or navigate a store the size of a small country, or even select the correct lane from which to make a left turn. But there is real wisdom in older people, and in relationships like the one between Arnold and Gladys.
If you slow down, silence yourself, and listen carefully, you can hear it whispered between the lines of the script they recite to each other.
* Not their real names, partly because I don't remember them now, and partly because the real names are not important to this entry.