Wor(l)d Building

"Nice jacket!" grey-bearded, hard-hatted Construction Worker Elder hooted into the wake of air left by the woman who had just about finished flowing by on Rice Howard Way.

His verbal spasm was delivered with the stress on jacket, and was aimed not as much at the woman (she was pretty much out of hearing range) as at sunglassed, hard-hatted Construction Worker Younger,  who was standing next to him in line at the Fat Franks gourmet hotdog cart.

Heavy lifting
His remark was in reply to Younger's question.

"What do you say now?" he had asked his wizened workmate. "We can't even say much anymore!"

By this curious lament (his stresses were on now and anymore) Younger was presumably testifying to the uncomfortable presence inside him of some kind of cultural governor, some piece of internal argument that inhibited what came naturally to a construction worker set a-sizzle by the presence of downtown beauty.

Things like, and worse than…well, you may know the gross soundtrack.

No, what happened here was what didn't happen here. She was not propositioned, she was not rated out loud, she was not reduced in language. Someone somewhere had gotten into Younger's head and told him that that doesn't happen anymore.

And he was a bit, frankly, bewildered by it.

Bewildered enough to have jokingly asked: "What do you say now? We can't even say much anymore!"

Not to worry, said Construction Worker Elder, guiding his young colleague, showing him the wisdom of his years.

"Nice jacket!" he said out loud, sort of.

Laughter all round, sort of.

"Here are your smokies, gentlemen," said the Fat Franks guy.





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

:)

Image
One of the joys and dangers of studying in the MACT program is that you start to feel scared enough to feel confident enough to fool around and try simple new things with technology. The danger is that you're not good enough not to spend most of your time fiddling around doing those things. And, so, this morning I am proud to announce that, taken by the hand, I have managed to embed html vimeo code into my blog. Please, no applause. This is not much, I know. Your basic 8 year old can do more. Asleep. But it is a minor accomplishment for me, because of me. And how I get in the way with my pre-wired reaction that new things won't work. The effect of that kind of thinking (or that lack of thinking) is that I transform the machine in front of me into an antagonistic force working to undo me. But it does remind me of me when I attribute malevolence to the skies when they conspire to bring rain on a morning of golf! Either way, that's bad storytelling. On another leve...
Read more

Hello!

Image
The potential socialness of a bicycle is built right into its roofless and windshieldless and doorless frame. It is easy to say hello on a bicycle. Like this morning. These sidewalkers nodded to me in unison at the exact instant I nodded to them. I said hello to the jogger, and he waved back. Hi, I said, to the dog walkers and the dog, and they nodded a greeting back. Both joggers smiled and said hello as our lives passed. I said hello to the squirrel. I said hello to the woman walking with poles and she returned the hello. The jogger looked over and I said hello as she said hello. I said hello to this fellow egg picker upper and we talked for a couple of minutes. Her bicycle comes out April 1. She is excited. Hello, I said. Hi, she said. I said hello to the  man on the other end of this leash and he said he and his dog were enjoying the beautiful morning. I said hello to this woman and she said hello, and we laughe...
Read more

Some Late Thoughts Listening To Wheat Kings

Image
Wheat Kings in Edmonton, July , 2016 I asked a friend at work what The Tragically Hip song Wheat Kings was about, and he paused for a beat longer than he would have had he not considered the same question many times. And then said: "I don't know." I took this as a good sign both of his humility and the song's profundity. It was an honest question. I don't know much about The Hip. They were cool for the first time when I was watching my wife raise our children, and trying to help the mission where I could. Those were busy days. The 1990s are my mediated decade, preserved by photographs of my younger self. Among the art that didn't get in was The Tragically Hip's. And it was a dishonest question. I knew the song was about David Milgaard's wrongful conviction and wrongful jail time served for the murder of Saskatoon nurse Gail Miller. And it was an honest question, because song's visual shards—that weathervane, a killer's face lit ...
Read more