Fooled

Maybe it's my age, having lived looooong but today I was caught completely unawares at my hairdresser's. I think I wrote about her place before. An old Victorian house in St. John's. All artifacts preserved, fire places, chandeliers, crown mouldings. A darling place with stairs running everywhere and the best atmosphere.

Every six months they mix up all the cutters and stylists and colourists, give them new work stations in different rooms in the house, match them up with those they haven't worked with before.

"Keeps us all fresh," says Bernice my faithful stylist. She's a gift, took me from hair to the waist to a smooth bob that lasts and lasts. You find a good cutter you stick with her/him.

So now she's been matched with this absolutely outrageous stylist for 6 months. I think my jaw dropped when I cast eyes on her for the first time today. Breddie, her name sounded like. Breddie was dressed in an absolutely wild purple and orange mini-dress revealing much of her body. Bright red pumps with 6" heels. Piercings with hardware all over her face including her mouth and nose. Matching colourful tattoos featuring wild flowers covered both her legs, her arms, her breasts and her neck. Her dyed blonde hair with purple streaks swung to her waist festooned with yellow bits and bobs. And one long ostrich feather of emerald green. I took her for an out of control 19 year old.

"Breddie's a card," laughed my stylist who's in her mid forties and dresses soberly in black with sensible work heels and a soothing manner.

Well, thought I grouchily, "card" would be a massive understatement in my book. I can just see the drug den and the biker boyfriend and their lives of dodgy cop avoidance.

An older woman toddled in and sat in Breddie's chair and proceeded to ask her for the wedding photos from the weekend. Whose wedding, thought I, surely Breddie and her criminal dimwitted druggie biker wouldn't be invited to anyone's weddinge

So Breddie hauls out her Iphone and treats the four of us in the room to HER wedding pictures at a pricey well known golf club. In white. All tats under wraps. All hardware removed. Criminal Biker Boy is in a black tux and a perfect hairdo with not a tat or a piece of metal or leather or hairy armpits in sight.

And the killer shot? Their two little flower girls scattering blossoms at their feet as the bride and groom kiss.

Their daughters, five and three years old.

Lemony Prune Mouth

I have to watch myself.

A dear friend maintains that as we get older our character defects become more emphasised and more entrenched.

Evidence corroborates.

If you're messy and cluttered the habits get worse as the energy dissipates with which to deal with them. The debris piles up in the face of decreased desire and perhaps a lifelong ennui. Whatever the cause.

I have to watch my inner judgemental self .

Particularly around drunks.

I was at a dinner party Saturday night. I should have left earlier than I did. Before it descended into loud arguments and hot debates and facets of friends that turn antagonistic/weepy/belligerent/ridiculous. Take your pick.

None of them will remember any of it in the morn. But I will. Alone in my rigid sobriety. Apart from one other. Who also engages in these mindless debates. He hosts and can't go to bed and leave his living room to an iffy scenario of mess and slop.

I sometimes have difficult with timing. Part of me doesn't want to desert the sinking ship of drunken debate and leave him alone on his island of sobriety.

And for a while, before the ocean of booze tips everyone into incoherence, the chat and food are enthralling and interesting.

And then.

Timing is everything. I can't seem to assess the best time to leave.

I think: I can't believe these people, all in their sixties, still behave like frat boys/girls when it comes to booze.

And I feel my mouth prune up and inner tut-tuts bang around in my head.

But I do manage to escape before the spliffs get passed around.

Not that anyone notices.

Running smack dab into my own faulty assumptions

I can form snap judgements on people which are invariably incorrect.

This was proven to me a few nights ago when I invited someone I know (but not very well) in, who was walking by on the road. I told her I had a really good blend of coffee and there was some to spare if she was interested.

She came in and we sat and chatted. She is a simple woman. I will call her Annie as the village where I have my house is very small. She was widowed young and left with seven children and she is six months older than me. Though in that way I have of looking at others of my age group, I view her as quite elderly.

Her husband and his brother were in their late twenties and out on a batter and got drunk and had a bad accident. The brother survived without a scratch. The husband died instantly. Co-incidentally the survivor’s the man who does all the handiwork around the house here, very gifted with woodworking, fishing, hunting, and digging holes for septic tank problems and installing stoves. A veritable genius.

She harbours no illwill against her brother-in-law. You can’t in a small village, she says. It teaches you to get over it and get along and to do all that with speed as you could wind up demented and alone if you took something like that on.

She has lived on welfare all her adult life since being widowed and says she should have been born a man as she never could get her head around the womanly things, like baking and dressmaking and housework. She built a house for her son, though, she couldn’t afford the backhoe so she dug out his basement by hand and then put the rest of it together from what she’s observed about housebuilding.

We took a walk after our coffee, Annie and I and my dog. Annie likes the bit of company she says, It’s not good to walk alone, the time goes faster when you have company. I agreed. I remarked on the good condition of the lane by the shore, how the hedges were so nicely trimmed and the grass kept down and the erosion halted by careful stone and plant placement.

“Oh, I do all that,” she said casually.

I was astonished. I thought she was joking.

“Ah no, I’m not”, she said, “The government has been good to me, all these years taking care of me and the children so to speak. I cut all the grass on the lane and keep the bushes trimmed, and I noticed the ocean was eating away at the edges of the lane so I stopped it. The old way my father taught me. Plants and rocks and seaweed.”

And no, she doesn't get paid for it. It's just her way of giving back.

And here I was thinking what on earth could a simple woman who has been on welfare all her life and me, who hasn’t, possibly have to talk about?

Well, like, loads. Life lessons. Forgiveness. The environment. Recycling. Housebuilding. And that's just for starters.

Picture taken a week ago in Cape St. Mary's