Friday, November 23, 2007

Throttling a Lion (postal observation)



Dear old lady, clearly she doesn't know how to reverse park. Worse still, she is stuck in third gear, car engine roaring like a wild lion, new to the circus routine. She doesn't know how to change to second gear, or certianly has avoided doing it, why can't she hear the scream of the engine? You think that's a clean sound, I bet, like clear lungs, and comparatively quiet compared to the noise of airplanes, of which you have complained to the council about already. She is isolated, sealed in, in her mechanical world, laughably helpless in your blue sphere, head barely peering over the steering wheel. Yet she is determined, no doubt convinced of her own ability, certian of her own method which she has been using for years now. Revving the engine, like a boy racer without a clue, wearing out the engine hour by hour. I look at you with strain in my eyes but you look right through me, busy negotiating with the steering wheel how exactly to turn this car around and get out of this tiny street.

Eventually, I walk off, to post more mail down a quiet street of blissful ease of Orchard Park. I hear you in the distance burning the clutch, its screams in furious baritone. I laugh lightly, the sun appears behind the cover of a cloud, and look back seeing you tittering back and forth, think you were driving an army tank, blocking the entire road with army nurse precaution. More like a passenger thrust at the controls of a diving jumbo jet, you'd think. The world is truly circus mad. Thank god. Thank God the world is circus mad and the inhabitants so eccentric and dumb and cruel and lost. I walk away, my pack lighter, my walk brisker, a good start to the day. Eventually, Ms Lady, roars off down the road in your Chariot, one last throttle and crunch of gears, looking in the rear view mirror, absentminded and oblivious rushing to meet Rena in the tea room to gossip over the persistence of dying memories, and summer Roses.