When a city-dweller moves to a small town, some suburbanites will warn them of the vicissitudes of the village life. These folks are well-meaning and have usually had some experience of living in a small community. If one takes the time to listen to their stories, usually, their bone of contention is the lack of privacy coupled with endemic gossip, sometimes malicious, sometimes benign, but always annoying.
In counter-point to this, it will be noticed by a city-dweller upon visiting a small town that it has a friendly, congenial atmosphere and that the people encountered seem to be warm, genuine folks. When their country cousins venture into the big city, they generally feel as if they had run into a solid wall of insensitive cattle.
Both are right and yet both are wrong. People see what they want to see. Nay, what they need to see, in order to bolster their own prejudices and cherished convictions. This is heinously complicated by the fact that a majority of people in both camps have never taken the time to sort out what, precisely their actual, personal, adult prejudices and convictions are. Because, largely, they have let their culture, government, society, family and religion do that task for them. They have also trusted osmosis to keep them current.
Many years ago, I had the experience of being told the precise balance of my bank account in a small town by a complete stranger, encountered while walking to my lodgings. When I moved back to the city, I was wrongly assumed to have committed a crime that happened to have occurred on the day of my departure from the little town. I was visited by the police in the city and easily proved my innocence.
After my Filipina wife and I had moved to the small town of Lillooet, we drove to Vancouver to buy a few locally unavailable ingredients for our country cupboards and to conduct some other business. We exited the highway and pulled into a Chinese T&T Supermarket parking lot. We had been inside the store for less than five minutes when I walked over with an armload of goods to deposit in my wife's basket and passed an old woman ambling down the busy aisle.
In a voice loud enough for only me to hear and after locking her steely blue eyes onto mine, quoth the Grandma, “Well, well, well... a white man with a chink wife. They look just like monkeys, don't they?”
She smiled like Dame Judy Dench at the Academy Awards Ceremony as I picked my jaw up off the linoleum. None of the scores of Asian people surrounding us in that Asian store, heard her nor did my wife. Only me. She resumed her racist waddle and continued beaming a radiantly malicious smile, deaf to my soft reply, which I will not catalogue here.
After ten weeks of bonding with Dusty Bones, Esq., our new young cat; we were walking to the Lillooet Post Office one afternoon. He had become accustomed to accompany me fishing, hiking, sleeping, eating, playing, shopping and working around the house. He rode in my back-pack when he was tired and he walked on a leash when he wanted to stretch his legs.
The day I speak of, we were taking an untried route to the Post Office and I hadn't brought the back-pack, due to the brevity of the distance to be travelled. Dusty had, at that point in his life, walked, leapt and run for up to six miles on a single journey. Cats like to pause every few steps, especially when they are in new territory. To get them moving again takes a tug on the chest harness. On familiar roads, they will practically heel like a canine. Sometimes they will just plant their feet and play the mule.
The latter was Dusty's choice as I tried to goad him into visual range of a small flock of sparrows a few hundred feet ahead. I heard from behind me, the voice of a well-meaning female, probably in her middle years.
“Is the kitten hurt?” was her query.
Her tone was one of patronizing disgust dipped in insincere treacle and her use of the definite article “the” instead of the possessive determiner “your” was not lost on me. In truth, it took some of the wind out of my spinnaker. The woman looked at me as if I was on my way to roast him on a spit. I picked Dusty up and we walked on.
As soon as we were free from her surveillance, Dusty pranced and capered like Lipizzaner Stallion all the way to retrieve the mail and all the way home again. When we arrived, he helped himself to our butter dish when my back was turned and then sprawled out on our bed while I recounted the misadventure to my wife.
Several years before, in Vancouver, at my work bus-stop, there was a new face. An anxious, thin young woman. It was about six AM and I was enjoying a smoke while waiting for my bus to arrive. The same bus I had taken to work for the previous fifteen years.
The stringy-haired, thirty-something blonde woman marched up to me abruptly and said, “Hey Buddy! You can't smoke at a bus stop, eh.”
I told her that I had been doing just that very thing for the past forty years and I asked her where the sign was, indicating that I could not. I next (and quite diplomatically) told her that it was possible that a new Bylaw had been passed without any notice to the public. Sadly, this had recently become a common practice for City Hall. Of my own volition, I paced off six meters from the bus stop.
She snorted like a horse and hauled out her cracked, sushi-smeared cell-phone and pointed its camera aperture at me in a menacing manner and simply said, “I can call the cops, eh.”
I informed her that the current average Vancouver Metro Police response time was twenty-six minutes and that she was welcome to await the boys and girls in black, but that I had a bus to catch. The transit vehicle hove into view. As we boarded the bus, I inquired into the veracity of the woman’s claim. The bus driver said that he was unaware of any new By-laws regarding smoking at bus stops. He added that he smoked at bus-stops everyday on all his work breaks. The lady, upon hearing this, said nothing and snorted again.
I have encountered people of both sexes, every race and all ages; busily and self authoritatively minding other people's business all over the world. I know this annoyance occurs in all languages and I venture the theory that it has likely plagued humanity all the way back through time.
Walking weenies form a percentage of any population. They are the children who didn't turn the light off, crawl under the bed and prove to themselves that there was no monster under there, except for their own imaginations. The apparent boldness of their approach is, in reality, aggression born of fear that has been pressurized by the psychological displacement of peer pressure caused by an ever changing mass-media menu of what is Kosher this week and what is not.
Butter-stealing cats need a soft swat on the behind but usually receive a pat and a hug instead. Self-appointed minders of others need pats and hugs but usually get rejection.
Five hundred years ago in Europe, busy bodies could get one clapped in irons by the Inquisition. There are places in our own time where similar mischief is wrought. If you enjoy looking at maps, it may interest you to know that Gerard Mercator was locked away in prison for quite awhile due to having had his name added to a list compiled by similar anonymous fools. He was released mainly because the big-shots of his day needed the fruits of his talents.
The Mainland Catholics needed maps, globes, compasses and other instruments to facilitate the invasion of Protestant lands and the Mainland Protestants needed accurate maps and tools to win those lands back. Both sides needed ever more detailed newer maps, as time went by, so they could conquer new lands and thus create new Catholics and Protestants by the fiat of the Doctrine of Discovery or the planting of their flags and crosses on the new beaches he’d carefully drawn.
The English Queen wanted a big piece of the newly emerging pie that she saw projected onto the hand-engraved copper plates of the master cartographer. Her young subject, John Dee was a lifelong admirer of Mercator, who owed much of his paid business to John's advertisement.
As Mercator was ceaselessly minding his own business and honing his chosen craft, he naturally became the best there was at his chosen craft, in his time. His name literally means merchant and he sold a mighty lot of globes and maps to a lot of important people. He always had enough money to provide for his family and to live in decent comfort. His life and accomplishments are to me, exemplary of the wisdom of work, dedication and the minding of one's own garden. The cartographic projection method that was recently used to map Mars is but one legacy of that quiet man.
So, I will now suggest my own updated map. A globe of human geography, if you will. I contend that science will one day prove that the human population centres on any part of our globe, during any era, consist of rather stable ratios of geniuses, fools, imbeciles, psychopaths and sycophants. If we assign a different symbol for each of these mentioned types and place markers for them on our globe, in their proper numbers and appropriate ratios, we can easily burst a very old myth. The myth long held by city-dwellers and by country people that they are somehow different.
I think we would discover, that people are no better nor worse in either environment. Annoying people are predictably proportional. Your chances of encountering a fool are greatly enhanced in a high density urban area, due to sheer numbers. In the wide open spaces of a small town, because the ratios stay the same, it is much less work to discern and to avoid the fools. This phenomenon was as true in Mercator's time as it is in ours.
A Cherokee once said that one should never argue with a fool because a third person passing by will not be able to tell which one of you is the fool.
Here then, is a prayer appropriate to the observations illustrated in this essay, along with five irritating questions of great antiquity and four responses of equal antiquity, ubiquity and durability. They are presented in Latin, a once popular language of the not so misty past. Plug them into Google Translate, if you are curious.
Oratio Cerokus Sverus: Libera me Deus ab consilium insipientibus.
Quinque Quaestiones
Quanti sumptus fecit?
Quantum mereris?
Ecquis erit terrarum pax?
Ubi convenisti uxorem tuam?
Suntne illi calceamenta novi?
Quatuor Responsiones
Qui inquirit?
Tu librum conscribas?
Mens tua negotia.
Ego te mordebo!
Fin