A Yellow Mouse
“I don’t know why people go to the gym” the old man declared, as the contents of his mouth were finding their way into my salad. I could swear bits of his half masticated pasta were also splashing onto my face. Something I was finding very difficult to ignore. The old man was a co-worker. A co-worker with several teeth missing. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem. I mean, I don’t judge people for simply having teeth missing, unless they also have their eyelids engraved in garish tattoos and their tongue sliced to imitate that of a snake. But I had to judge here because the holes in this old man’s grin had become windows through which saliva drenched food projectiles were raining down on my meal. My poor salad on the table below started to resemble an innocent farming village receiving a mortar bombardment. Like some kind of culinary Apocalypse Now. Now, this was becoming a a problem.
’Ughhh, could you just get some teeth and or not talk for a while,” I though to myself.
Obviously my telepathy wasn’t functioning 100% today. So far I had gathered that he had a problem with young people going to the gym. Not entirely sure why, but I assumed it was because they were young and striving for something that vaguely amounts to a healthy life, and he was old, really old and smoked like Mt.St Helens on a bad day. When people behave in the complete opposite way to you, its easy to reduce it to
I seemed to find myself in these situations a lot in life.
If we take a conversation to be more or less an equal verbal exchange of information between two individuals then this wasn’t falling within those parameters. But then maybe I was being too idealistic. I mean, most of the conversations I have with people tend to be me listening to the other person’s narrow conceptualization of the world, and then me nodding in agreement. I rarely agreed.
If I actually spoke my mind, spoke the the truth as I saw it, the world would stop spinning and then I would be chased out of my city by a mob of torch wielding witch hunters. Or just de-friended by people on Social Media. In my world, the truth was too much for most to bear. In this case, Mr.Mt.St Helens was on another planet, and there were many lightyears that separated our minds. As he continued, I zoned out, and naturally my mind began to wonder.
I started to remember a boy from my secondary school who lost one of his teeth. It was during a hockey match when a hockey ball found its way into his face, or into his upper left incisor to be exact. One of the most important teeth for keeping up appearances. Not that he had a lot of appearances to keep up, for he was a short, mousy looking kid with a haircut he must of received from a blind person. His mousy features encouraged me to imagine that he kept blocks of cheese in his lunchbox. In the last period of the school day a large commotion erupted on the hockey court. The mousy boy was kneeling on the ground as a school nurse rushed to the scene with a glass of milk. Not for him to drink, but to preserve the tooth. Until then I thought dropping a tooth into milk was just the kind of pseudo science featured on after-school kids’ TV programs, but apparently milk keeps the root cells of the tooth intact. Usually I would stick up for little kids, especially ones that resembled furry little animals that had their teeth knocked out by hockey balls, but not this one. This one I found rather odd.
A year before during a history class, he turned around in his chair to let me know,
‘You’re yellow’.
I was taken off guard. I’d never been assigned a color before. Did it mean I had to perform a special dance whenever a rainbow appeared? I didn’t know how to process his information by the mousy boy with a blind man’s haircut. My friend sitting next to me stepped in.
‘What do you mean he’s yellow?’ he inquired.
‘You know, you’re yellow,’ he repeated so matter of fact. It was as if he was reading the titles from a history textbook. OK, chapter 1, Hitler invaded Poland, chapter 2, you’re yellow, chapter 3 three I have a block of cheddar in my lunch box, chapter four, David who sits in the back row’s terrible body odor bad is actually due to a congenital defect. The whole thing was odd for there was no sign of hatred on his face. His eyebrows relaxed, face covered in neither grin nor frown. It was simply a case of me being yellow and him needing to tell me before I discovered it for myself on the next page of our history textbook.
Even to this day, I don’t think he meant to be racist. He probably had just eaten too much cheese and that somehow whatever makes cheese yellow had induced a biochemical reaction in eyes that disrupted his ability to perceive color correctly. At least, that was one theory. That or I was actually yellow and he was the first person to let me know. In any case, he would regret his faux pas as we would hound the boy for the next 3 years. Every time we came across him in the school yard, in a class, in the tutor’s room, on the way to the bus my friend would ask him ’Don’t you want to talk to us anymore?’ ‘Is it because he’s yellow?’ The boy never replied, but his face showed a mixture of embarrassment and then frustration as he knew he had said something that didn’t need to be said. Poor mouse. They fixed his upper left incisor saving his future family from having to put up flying food projectiles.
My mind came back to the present moment. Mt.St.Helens was still yapping on about young people going to the gym. My salad was now no longer fit for consumption. And I had no intention of contending with the old volcano. People don’t win against volcanoes. Not at this range. I longed to go home but it was raining outside. I was stuck between a volcano and a hard place. To pass the time and keep a modicum of sanity, a glass or several of red wine would be in order. I raised my hand and scanned the room for the waitress, while the old volcano continued its eruption and the sound of rain pattered against the window reminding me how I was stuck in the present moment.