Authenticity in the Fog in Everyday Ramblings

On the off chance you might not be aware of what season it is here; the fog and leaf litter are a bit of a giveaway. This was from a delightful walk with Mrs. Sherlock, Frieda, and Charity on Saturday morning. It was not raining but it was cold, and the fog got more intense until it finally blew out of the valley.

Mrs. Sherlock has almost exclusively been riding her bike until she got that sore throat and rested and lately, she is getting a little winded when encountering elevation. She wanted up, but not too much, and Charity does not enjoy it at all, so finding a local route that is at least 5 miles round trip, but not too much more, was my challenge. I am not getting in anyone’s car until the case counts start going down, so that at least limits the territory available.

These two are an absolute hoot when they are together. They appointed me to be the lead while they walked together and chatted away. The teasing started from the get go, and as the guide I also got a lot of ribbing. It is this delightful openhearted silliness that they bring out in each other.

I had another encounter with the problematic woman on the Yoga Teacher’s call last week and came to the conclusion as soon as she started in on what I had said that, oh, it is not me with the problem here, it is her. But still I was upset enough to eat a whole (relatively small but whole) bag of sweet potato chips (which I dutifully logged in my food log) afterwards.

In sharing the encounters with both of these wonderfully wise supportive women (who barely know each other) it became even more apparent that the problem was not with me, or what I said, or the ideas I was putting forth. And that I had handled it fine, the group had handled it fine and sad as it is that this woman felt the need to create drama where there was none, I now have the memory of this funny, wicked sharp conversation to support me (and one the day earlier with Kes) as I navigate this teacher’s group in the future.

On the live business call yesterday the facilitator said someone who had been with the teacher’s group a long time had dropped out and one does wonder…could it be?

We learn and grow and maybe even deal with our stuff when we are in relationship and that is mighty hard when one is alone in lockdown, so I am even more grateful for these encounters, live on walks and online, than ever before.

They both wanted coffee, it was seeping cold, so we altered our route to find an open coffee shop. On the way I mentioned that the deepening fog was getting Brigadoon like and Charity, with a theater background, said she once did the lighting for a production of Brigadoon and stared singing “The Heather on the Hill”.

We were walking with Frieda through a very expensive well-kept neighborhood as you can tell from the historic one among many houses above. A bit earlier we had encountered three well-kept women with masks on power-walking down the middle of the street, all about the same height, weight, color and class.

We waved and said hi.

We were not power-walking, we were sort of in a ragtag order, half on the sidewalk, half on the street, having a lively discussion involving Siri on Mrs. Sherlock’s iPhone about whether dolphins and whales were originally land animals and the discovery of birdsong in female birds by female scientists.

And then in our mismatched clothes and masks we started trying to remember which was the featured love song in Brigadoon, horsing around with Frieda and then singing phrases of other love songs from contemporaneous musicals, in retrospect not the smartest thing to do in the middle of a respiratory pandemic but we were very much outside and not facing each other.

Earlier there had been a lively discussion about that woman locally in Washington that passed herself off as Black and was head of an organization that encouraged civil rights and the needs of the Black community. It was a reflection on authenticity and what that was about.

One thing I can say about three older women walking in the fog on a Saturday morning being goofy and singing show tunes and making each other laugh is that we were fully realized as ourselves. And what a gift it is, although sometimes I know it can seem like a burden, to have a deep rich lifetime of experiences to share.

And here is a link to an illuminating interview with a writer who has been following the Trump phenomenon for Vanity Fair and his take on what is going on there with the people who touch our lives that we don’t seem able to reason with. It may be geo-blocked I am sad to say. The author’s name is Jeff Sharlet.

Last updated November 25, 2020