Cyprus Mail
CM Regular ColumnistOpinion

Who we think we are

Colette

THE WAYS THINGS ARE

By Colette NiReamonn Ioannidou

I met Dub in a store before Christmas, she on the high-price aisle, me poking through the discount bargains opposite. Her hyacinth blue eyes above the mask painted like a Pict’s ready for battle. She lowered the mask with, ‘What d’think of my latest work?’ I told her she looked great as I dipped my mask, steaming specs preventing me from seeing the price on a label. With the subtlety of a blow from Thor’s hammer she says, ‘Your skin looks like an old candlewick bedspread. Why don’t you do something about it?’

Another time I might have joked it off but I was in the grumps over other problems and, a few minutes earlier, I’d run into an old pal, Dub’s Polar opposite, who had lost all her front teeth and hadn’t the money to replace them. She doesn’t drive, so over the course of her life has walked kilometres that would make a Marathon champion hand back achievement accolades. Apart from her teeth loss and all that entailed, she confided that her waterworks now needed frequent toilet visits in a town that lacked public pee facilities and, with so many places closed, walking had become a problem.

So, Dub with her financial security and obsession with her face, had hit the fire-in-the-hole button on my simmering frustrations. I snapped, ‘It’s an awful pity you don’t have as many manners in your mouth as you have euros in the bank.’ Her eyebrows hit her hairline as I walked away.

Going home I thought about the human species, and what a strange breed we are. The way we see ourselves isn’t always the way others observe us. At times we’re too busy being the self we think we are to stop and take stock of who and what we actually are. If a woman can and wants to make herself look younger, better, by all means she should. But when that ability is callously, thoughtlessly, used to make someone who can’t or doesn’t want to, feel less, Thor’s hammer needs to change hands.

Depending on beliefs, scientific or religious, we’re either part star dust, earth or sea born, made from clay by the creator, or emerged from whatever spiritual origins we have tribally learned or independently chosen. And like the earth that bears our destructive weight, we too suffer tectonic shifts in moods and volcanic eruptions of emotions. What is it, though, in an individual that sends annoyance into anger, anger into fury and fury into violence? Why can some of us control our need to strike out and hurt while others let the heat control them?

I witnessed two men who clashed choose differing ways: one walked away from an altercation; the other enraged, determined to carry it further, went after him. The argument logically required a simple apology; it wasn’t given. It was the perpetrator, a Greek, who called the police possibly believing that the other, a foreigner, would be found at fault. The foreigner was parking his car next to his business when he saw a man urinating against his camper-trailer. He has two young children who travel in that trailer, so his irritated reaction was understandable, and there were trees nearby. Tall could have said, sorry, I was desperate, he didn’t. Within moments Tall, towering over the Trailer Man, was verbally abusing him. Trailer Man was not going to be intimidated and stood his ground.

I know both and I advised Trailer Man to leave and not get sucked in as the other, spoiling for a fight, was yelling how he’d called the police, confident he would be absolved. Trailer Man walked away to his shop, Tall flew after him. What the big man didn’t know was there were helpers in the premises. However, he managed to assuage his fury by throwing some items onto the road before being chased out by the staff. His wife, a lovely, gentle woman, had come by then, anxious for him. The police arrived in force as though possibly expecting a gang scene from West Side Story.

While Trailer Man was being rudely spoken to by one officer, I told a calm police woman what had transpired and that Tall was the belligerent one. She took my particulars as onlookers and protagonists dispersed. Later, Trailer Man told me the police had called to ask if he wanted to charge the man, he said no, let it go. I wonder if a public toilet might have saved all that. I see Tall often, he’s unfriendly and dour, depressed, perhaps unhappy with his life, his job. Maybe he’s unfulfilled, feels he’s worth something better, I don’t know. Whatever inner burdens he carries, his underlying volcano erupted on a blameless man who had the right to be annoyed with his actions. And he was willing to make that man suffer to pay for his pain.

 

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