The Aerie
Yes it was Writing Group tonight. Terry brought the final installation
of his novel and a bottle of Asti Spumante with which to celebrate.
And Tam brought something new, despite the fact that she does
technical writing for a living these days. But as we had nothing new
last time, we were left with time for a writing exercise. We
squandered it chatting and griping about politics, and ended up being
in group til ten p.m. Anyway, here is tonight's entry...
(Copyrighted 2002, so there!)
We used my wife's Writing Exercise Cards but contributed random
characters that we made up and tossed into a hat. I drew these:
Character: Taste Tester @ Pillsbury Lab
Character: Candlemaker
Place: gym
Emotion: jealousy, envy
Plot: a search for something
They met and fell in love and had children and grandchildren and died
within weeks of each other at the ripe old age of ninety-seven and
ninety-five respectively because among other reasons she couldn't
place his face. At this time they are still young, thirty five and
thirty seven, but consider themselves old because they are no longer
in their Twenties, and their bodies have shed the immortal radiance of
youth and begun to succumb to the minor indignities of life such as
hemorrhoids and grey hair.
Her hair is a pale, unprepossessing mousy brown that at upon one
occasion or another most of her lovers have suggested she dye blond.
She has in fact been so often advised to color her hair, change her
style of clothing, pierce various fleshy areas and lose weight that
she has begun to wonder if she is perhaps a seat-holder at the awards
ceremony of someone else's life, and these men are waiting for the
glamorous, sequined occupant of her seat to arrive.
So when she sees him at the gym she is inclined to hate him. She is
not licentious but she is a fully modern woman of her time and place
(those being the first decade of the Twenty-First Century) and she has
felt free to have as many social, emotional and sexual relationships
as she could manage while also forging a career as a taste tester for
a large international chain of food manufacturers. She is in fact
being spiritually drawn and quartered by the expectations of her
parents, her culture, her fears and her desires, but she does not come
to this realization before the sudden onset of children renders all
these expectations moot.
For his part he is to remain oblivious to her attentions for a few
moments more, despite the fact that if her gaze were in fact as icy as
it appears he would be encased in a glacier some fourteen feet in
height, width and depth. In attempting to broom-handle his identity
from beneath the refrigerator of her memory she has dragged into the
light some extremely dusty and unpleasant recollections of sticky,
bug-ridden relationships past, and is pre-emptively holding her future
husband responsible for the resulting debris.
So while he stubbornly and repeatedly compels a pair of innocent
free-weights to resist the blandishments of the gravitic pull of the
planet at his back, she is failing to be impressed by his musculature
and becoming increasingly convinced that he is a cad named "Reginald"
who treated her rudely during her last year of college.
He is, in fact, not Reginald but an employee at a gift shop two blocks
from her workplace with whom she has had several bland but not
unpleasant social interactions during her twice-yearly visits to his
store before both her mother's and sister's birthdays. He has asked
her if there is anything that he can do for her three times. He has
instructed her to have a nice day on four occasions, to no actual
effect. She has once asked him about a scented candle that she was
purchasing, and in fact it can be said that all of their children,
grandchildren, great-grand-children and eventually as sizable portion
of the entire human race owe their existence to this lavender scented
candle.
For it is as she glares in irritation at the man repeatedly
demonstrating that objects lifted against gravity eventually succumb
to it again that a woman passing behind our dear girl employs a very
common phrase within earshot while conversing with a friend.
"...well she couldn't hold a candle to that offer..."
And deep within the her brain her synapses carry the idea of a lit
candle, which crashes down among several concepts of regarding candles
in general, one of which knocks against the memory of the lavender
scented candle given as a gift. This memory teeters in an uncertain,
bowling-pin fashion, but finally gives in to the gravity of the
situation and clatters against the rather favorable mental image of
the well-groomed man behind the counter at the gift store who had
explained to her that he had in fact made the lavender-scented candle
himself, that morning, in the very back of the shop.
And suddenly the scales, as the saying goes, fall from her eyes,
although in fact it is a thick layer of preconceptions and projections
that collapse in a heap, and she sees the young lad in a new, more
favorable, and somewhat guilty light. For although he was entirely
oblivious to her stern attentions at that point, she could not have
been more enveloped by guilt if she had actually been cursing him with
the name "Reginald" only to have him turn around and not be Reginald.
So when he does, at that moment, happen to turn around, having
completed his ritual thirty-six attempts to convince iron weights to
fly, his eyes meet hers. The gauze of guilt that she wears so
compliments her features, enhanced by a brief look of shock, a sudden
blush, and a demure ducking of the head, that he immediately and
somewhat egotistically attributes her reactions to sexual attraction
rather than unwonted shame and guilt. And she, her opinion so clouded
by an entirely unnecessary sense of obligation for having silently
abused him in the name of others, is rather less inclined than she
might usually be to dismiss his attentions.
And so, swathed in a fog of misperceptions and entirely misread
motivations, the two of them begin the rather long, slow process of
falling deeply and entirely in love.
[1]Last
Posted by Albatross at November 12, 2002 12:00 AM