I really need to buy an umbrella! My hurried steps bombarded the pavement as I dashed to Waterstone's in the tumbling rain. I made it, the only minor casualties being the temporary distortion of my vision by murky glasses, and the equally unimportant darkening with damp of the front of my jeans, which had borne the full heft of the rain. Once safely inside, I completed my normal routine, but unfortunately the girl behind the counter doesn't know that I like to sit in and drink my coffee, so the two times she's made my magical mocha, she has made it in a take-away cup. This time I marshaled the shy scattered spirits of confidence, and I asked her if she wouldn't mind changing it to a proper cup, if it wasn't too late.
She has a lovely smile, and I firmly believe that people with lovely smiles are lovely people. When I say "smile", I don't just mean the mouth part: I mean the entire face, the voice and the eyes, and the eyebrows. You can't fake a beautiful smile, because the beauty is embedded in the uniqueness of the person, and thus a unique smile will always be a beautiful smile. A copy of true beauty can never match up to the original, because once it's a copy, it isn't unique, and the uniqueness is the whole essence of the beauty. That's another philosophy I have been trying to understand and apply recently: seeing each person as unique, and thus as beautiful. The winning aspect of this philosophy, which makes it one that I sincerely hope I will be able to begin to apply subconsciously, is that it's always possible to find something unique about a person, and therefore it is always possible to see beauty in them.
This just reminded me of Plato's discussions of the Ideals - where Beauty is the ideal from which beautiful things result. Oh my goodness I feel so blessed. There are so many times during class, or discussions, or life in general, when I realise what a well-rounded and wholesome education I have been given. I had a sort of revelation today, as we were studying the late 19th century British and Boer politics: we learnt all about this in Form Two. It wasn't in as much detail, but this period of history had an existence somewhere in the timeline in my mind. My understanding of the world had already been expanded by this knowledge, and learning all of this Empire stuff now is defining and filling in the details and the colour and expanding my mind's scope even further. And the more we read and discuss now, the more I recall vague lessons and discussions from high school, and junior school too actually. I remember learning about the Bantu migration in Grade Three, I think, and drawing little maps. And we learnt about Bilharzia in Grade Four. And mud and the earth and chameleons in Grade Five. It's interesting though that the facts and knowledge I remember most vividly are not from the higher up years of junior school, when I was 11 or 12. Rather, I remember the excitement of Environmental Science taught by Miss Cox, in Grade Four, when I was nine. I remember becoming an "Insect Inspector" and copying down notes written in her graceful, elegant, swan-like handwriting on the chalk-board about the queen bee and her worker bees, and colouring in a picture of two queen bees fighting for the role of queen. And compound eyes and flies. It isn't limited to that sphere only though: I remember the delight and sense of pride learning about long-division, and being able to divide three digit numbers instead of just two. And then realising that you could keep doing the same thing, even with five or six digit numbers - that was honestly and truly the high point of my mathematical curiosity! There was nothing more satisfying than getting that right, and it actually making sense. Daddy divide, mummy multiply, sister subtract, and brother bring down. Repeat. SUCH excitement. And then the poems we learnt in Grade Three, and the stories we wrote in Grade Two. And Carla's real live chicken at Show and Tell in Grade One. Does anyone know this poem? I still remember most of it by heart, twelve years later!
"Cats sleep anywhere,
any table, any chair.
Top of piano, window ledge,
in the middle, on the edge.
Open door, empty shoes,
anybody's lap will do."
Okay that's all I remember. I could draw you the picture that accompanied it though.
Here's the real poem - let's see if I remembered right!
"Cats sleep anywhere, any table, any chair.
Top of piano, window-ledge, in the middle, on the edge.Open drawer, empty shoe, anybody's lap will do.Fitted in a cardboard box, in the cupboard with your frocks.Anywhere! They don't care! Cats sleep anywhere."- Eleanor Farjeon (1881 - 1965)
See, I told you I'd remembered most of it!
All this to say that I am so grateful for the education I received, a bright education which revealed this wonderful web of the world to me! In spite of all the negatives of the "old" school system, the strictness, and the sometime-presented inflexibility of fact, I was shown so much of the world from my (most of the time!) safe seat in those rickety desks and bottom-pinching chairs!
HAHAHHAHA I just heard someone say "So have you started looking for a husband yet?" "Oh, yes, I've found one." Oh wow.
So back to the title of this blog! "Blonde Tarzan asks Me Something". After being presented with a mocha in a cup by the obliging lady with the beautiful smile, I got up to go and put some water in my bottle. You have to walk around the counter to get to the water dispenser, and on my way back, I almost bumped into a large man clad in a large red rain-coat. Usually I just smile and say sorry for bumping into you and keep on walking, and the person either has already moved off, or smiles back and moves off. But this person didn't move away. Instead, he bobbed his head tentatively - any more vigorous bobbing may have sent it tumbling off the precipice of his shoulders, long, blonde hair and all - and he moved his mouth as if he wanted to ask something but wasn't sure how to form the words. Obviously I either frequent this spot to such an extent that my aura has been imbued with the essence of the place, and he just thought that I worked here; or I am an approachable and inoffensive looking soul, who seems to anxious beings as if she might know how to solve their problems. I am happy to accept either of these positions! His blue eyes had diamonds in them, so bright and sparkly they were. For a man of such an imposing stature, a veritable Tarzan of a Prince Charming, he was rather shy, and the question in his mind was not forthcoming. So I smiled at him. (You see, my philosophy, though not designed to be, is also self-serving: if my smile is unique, it must be beautiful, right?) That seemed to encourage him, and within a moment he realised that the next step in this human interaction was to ask his question.
"Um, could you, um, tell, um, where is the, um, bathroom?" he mumbled, though not so incoherently that I missed the dashing Australian accent that punctuated his sentence. The virtue of exploring a place and expanding your knowledge of its inner workings (ie. being nosy) was made reinforced to me in this moment.
"Well," said I, grinning knowledgeably, "yes, I do." I proceeded to give Blonde Tarzan directions to the bathroom, not without a hint of triumph, as, for those who know me, it is quite an achievement for ME to be able to give directions, as that gives some proof that somewhere inside me, I actually do have a sense of direction! Blonde Tarzan went on his way, and I sat down to write about my oh-so-eventful life. Honestly, it is ALL about the small things!
That's all I'm going to write for today, because I don't think I can handle any more events like the Blonde Tarzan Moment of 26 July 2017; in the hopes of proving the existence of the Positive Thinking phenomenon, I will end here and positively think that nothing more eventful will happen today, and that I will get home peacefully, sans monumental moments.
Last thing though: a really cool story about Winston Churchill! Churchill in the Boer War
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