It was hard not to eavesdrop. This woman was loud. With her two coffee klatch middle aged friends in the upscale neighbourhood coffee shop they all wore privilege and entitlement like a not very subtle perfume. The principal spokesperson, the loud woman, spoke in rather a drawling, but polished bray, a fifty-ish version of the popular but conniving and very capricious bitchy girl who occasionally got laid by the captain of the high school football team. I think I missed not one single word during the hour or so they were there, occupying my usual table in the back with the comfy chairs and I did wait rather impatiently for them to leave since I really wanted my seat back. I certainly wasn't going to expect it. It might have been my favourite chair and perhaps I had a rather neurotic sense of personal feng shui wrapped up with it, or could it be better called a sense of entitlement? But my name is not on that chair and I am not going to expect it to be available every time I want it.
From time to time I would look behind me to see if they were starting to wrap up. It was a very long hour. Their conversation, which was rather the loud woman's preamble, went from one stage of gossip to another. She said something about visiting a family member unannounced, to surprise everyone and to see if everything was going as it ought. I at first imagined she was still referring to her tall athletic daughter. Then she said something about a paper cup containing pills and I wondered if she has a child in mental health care. The word senior's centre came up and eventually I clued in that she was talking about her aged mother. The whole conversation took on rather a sombre tone and the women, especially the loud one, all seemed to be speaking, quite eloquently, from their hearts. The loud one mentioned that people often call her a bitch but really she just likes to speak her mind.
I have generally thought of the word bitch as meaning something a bit different: a nasty, offensive and scolding woman with a bad attitude and a real mean streak, or something like that. I never thought of bitchiness as meaning the same thing as being honest. But isn't that the Canadian way? Women are generally called bitches and men are assholes (they all come from Uranus!) but really if those rather sexually differentiated slurs just refer to plain unadulterated honesty and not horrible, mean and selfish behaviour then I have probably been living with my head buried in the sand. I have always been honest. Does this make me an asshole? Or a bitch? Or just honest? But honesty, in social contexts anyway, is not generally looked favourably upon and most of us lie through our teeth to one another, if only to save face, our sorry little hienies and to make us look good to others.
Are we really all lying scoundrels? And really, is it such a horrible thing to not be brutally honest so as to not hurt another's feelings? But what about those who lie kindly about your creative abilities, and after being lied to enough by well-intentioned others we come to believe ourselves to be the best chef since Hell's Kitchen (and that guy is an asshole if ever one existed on the face of this planet), the greatest artist since Picasso (and that's not saying a lot) or the best singer since Leonard Cohen (now, there's a "musician" who's really believed a lot of kind lies about his singing voice though he does shine as a poet.)
I think we really need to redeem truth-telling so that it is no longer treated as a social sin, but that we can also learn to speak the truth in love, or in such a way that we are really taking the best possible care of one another. The truth hurts the worst when it is clear that the one speaking it doesn't love us. Which is to say, Gentle Reader, rather than put our best face forward as we often do hear in nice polite Canada (until they get on the hockey rink) perhaps we really need to do is to learn how to love. Easy, isn't it? Like cutting grass with cuticle scissors? No excuses!!!
No comments:
Post a Comment