Here you go, sir—um, I mean ma’am.

There are no beautiful/significant/artsy-pants pictures to be taken down at the pasture these days.  No, it’s all gone to slush and mud and depressed and shedding horses.  This is the ugly time of year.  If I had time, I’d challenge myself and get out there and find beauty even in the slosh.  But I don’t.  Have time.  Cause Ginna’s coming and I am trying to red up the house (old English expression).  Not because she’d care if there was dust, but because I don’t want her to lose that romantic glow of memory to grim reality.

I say this, and I was just doing some dishes – when suddenly, across the ancient snow there was a flash of sunset light, not blue, cold, gray light—something much golden and warm.  I looked up and it was caught in the naked trees too, the branches and trunks gone gold and glowing – as if they were warming up, and leaves were stirring in there.  It only lasted a minute, but it brought my heart up.

Okay – on to business. I’ve been thinking about the comedy of errors thing I wrote about before – with my dad and me.  Being mistaken.  Mistaking.  Like I said in those comments (if you haven’t been reading the comments, you’ve been missing some fun – like that post that turned out to be a discussion of humor, some interesting discussion there), stuff like this happens all the time.  Like when I was in grad school, and I met my younger sister (four years younger, but married – and me hanging out there in the breeze, teaching Freshman English) for lunch.  We were in the bookstore and ran into a friend of hers.  Kev introduced me and the friend beamed down on me very kindly—“So, you’re a freshman here at the “Y?” she said.  I didn’t mind that one.

Or the time in Texas when I was home for Christmas (again in grad school) and picking up some framing my mom had had done.  Standing in line there in the land of UTA, I found myself next to a middle eastern male who was flexing his eyebrows at me.  “Well,” he said, undulating slightly, “so what high school do you go to?”  

“I’m in graduate school at BYU,” I said scathingly, if not crushingly—or imaginatively, then picked up Mom’s order and stalked off.  But maybe I didn’t mind that one either, because – hey – how often do you get to scathe?

This kind of thing really messes up being nice. I honestly make a big effort to accommodate people when I can.  Like, in Paris, I spoke French—trying really, really hard not to be the Ugly American, and ending up to be the idiot American because I could never understand the answers after I asked a question.  And with the influx of (okay – how do you say this?  Hispanic?  Latino? Spanish speaking people) I try very hard to be gracious and respectful, even though I’ve got about five words of Spanish to work with.  So one day, I said “Gracias” to my bagger at Smith’s.  She said,  “Excuse me?”

I sheepishly whispered, “Ummm – gracias?”

And she said, “Actually, I’m from Bangladesh.” Or somewhere like that.  It’s kind of had a quelling effect on my confidence.

So when we were in Texas, and dad was paying the toll lady who had what sounded to me like a Spanish accent, I screwed up my confidence and, from WAY over in the passenger seat where I couldn’t really see clearly, okay – I said another “Gracious.”  But this one turned out to Sudanese.

So there I am, hoping to be nice, and ending up sounding like an idiot.  Worse, a patronizing idiot.

What’s really bad is when this happens with gender. When all the kids were all little, Cam was so darned pretty, what with his almost white blond hair that was so long (well – how could I cut it, for heaven’s sake?), everybody who saw him gushed over him.  And every darned one of them thought he was a girl.  We were at Marie Callendar’s one night with all three blond kidlets, and this woman stopped at our table, leaned over Cam slightly and said, “You have the three cute, cute daughters!”

Four year old Cam, as he always did, looked up with his mouth all prim and puckered and said, “Actually, I’m a boy.”  It always embarrassed people and he always got a lot of satisfaction out of that.

It’s really bad when you make that mistake with grown-ups.  Not that I have.  But there’ve been times when I COULD have, if I hadn’t kept my mouth shut.

And then there are the state of being mistakes.  Like saying “What’s wrong?” to somebody who thinks they’re having a good time.

One day long ago, a family member of mine showed up at my front door dressed in a loose yoked shirt and a really, really bad mood.  “Do NOT ask me if I’m pregnant,” she warned as she stalked past me into the house.  Umm.  She really did look pregnant.  I didn’t say, “Well, you know – if you’re going to dress maternity –“

And then there was this lady in my ward who was really bent because when she’d taken the daughter she’d waited thirty years to conceive shopping for clothes, the salesperson had very kindly said to the little girl, “Let’s see if your grandma likes this one!”

So it’s not like I’m alone in this.

Still.  Okay, I really don’t think I look eighty.