I went for a walk last week. I was annoyed, and tried praying, but couldn’t quite. My annoyance spiraled itself tighter around me until it grew into a mild anger. It seemed best to get out of the house, so I walked.
Walking past a playground, I heard, “Ciao!” and looked around. It must have been the young girl on the zipline. I returned her greeting. “What’s your name?” she asked, and I told her. “Are you a girl?” “Well…” I said, not sure how to answer that one. Terms are so relative.
I told Greta that I was 26, and she told me she was 9, and this was her little sister Melissa, who was 4. I wished them fun and left, finding a bench to sit on. I looked at a tree. It is hard to look at a tree long and try to tell the God who made green that you have a right to be angry because someone hurt your feelings. I’ve tried; it is much simpler to stop demanding rights.
Sunday it was easy to be joyful. The world was new and beautiful. After church, one of the elders asked me if I would consider marrying an Italian man. It’s always a bit awkward answering that question when the person asking it is an Italian man. “Remember, I married an Englishwoman,” he said. “She said she wouldn’t have married the ‘classic Italian,’ but I’m not a ‘classic Italian.’” “Good,” I said. “I mean…” “No, no,” he said. “That type, with the Mamma…” he shook his head.
I bought a hand-held fan on the way back from church. After serious deliberation, I went with a red one, with flowers painted on it (then on my way home, saw white, green, pink and blue that I liked). Only later did I notice that it says, “Espana” –it was probably made in China, too.
I had my first chance to use it while standing in line at the grocery store, then again when I wandered through the side door into the Catholic church on the corner and found myself at a concert of baroque chamber music. Others peeked in the door, including one with an OU shirt. Unfortunately I didn’t think it would be polite to whistle Boomer Sooner in the middle of a concert.
On Monday I went with Brea to get her ID card. “Keep this envelope,” the lady said. “It has pin numbers which will be able to be used in the future to activate different uses.” “What different uses?” I asked. She almost chuckled guiltily. “No one knows.”
On Tuesday I went with Troy and Penny to sign the contract with the owner of their apartment. While there, the real estate agent discovered that the man didn’t have the right to sign it—it needed to be signed by his daughter, since the property was in her name (there are laws giving tax breaks to women who own property to encourage women in business). So he was going to sign her name until I protested. Her name is on the document now, but we didn’t see who put it there. Then we needed a signature from the old woman who used to live there to be able to switch the utilities to their name, who is now 91 and in a nursing home. The woman at the water board suggested that I sign her name. The woman at the agency signed it, after asking me if I was any good at forgery. But they also require a copy of her ID card, and the only one the agency had was expired, because—the old woman is unable to sign for a new one. When Troy went to find the water reading before going to the agency, he realized that the number didn’t match any of the meters. So we told the agency lady (she told me, “By now you’re at home here”), who called the son, who called back the next day to say he’d gone to the water agency to close the water. So now we just needed to open it. When we went to do that, I asked if they would shut off the water in between, and they said, “Oh, you need to do a sub-entry” (what we’d tried to do before when they said we needed the old lady’s signature) and typed some things in the computer and said it was done. No forgeries involved.
