I am a person with few enemies. I’m very friendly despite being almost pathologically introverted, and I don’t talk shit about people, and I don’t look for trouble, and I try to be helpful whenever I can. I like most people, and most of the people I know like me. I think so, anyway. I could be wrong.
But everyone has an enemy or two. Everyone has that one person (or many people in some cases) with whom they just don’t click. I’ve lived in my neighborhood for almost 20 years and I get along with almost everyone here, except for two women with whom I have had repeated disagreements and misunderstandings about one thing or another. The blood is just bad now, and I don’t even try anymore. I don’t even worry about it. I run into these women from time to time and I say a polite hello and they say a polite hello, and then I get out of there as fast as I can so that those bitches can talk about me behind my back. I never talk about them behind their backs, of course, unless writing about them on the internet counts as talking behind their backs.
Last week, I was out for an evening walk, and I saw one of these women coming toward me from the opposite direction. She wasn’t after me or anything, she was just out minding her own business, taking a walk with her husband. But she saw me just as I saw her and it would have been awkward to the point of rudeness for either of us to change directions or duck around a corner to avoid the other. I sucked it up and prepared for a stiff exchange of pleasantries with my foe. I’m sure she braced herself, too.
And then just as we were in polite hello striking distance, a thought occurred to me. “Hi (name and name),” I said. “Did you guys see that debate?” LOL, as if they’d have missed it.
Were you thinking that politics was the last thing I should have mentioned? In most cases you’d be right. In a normal awkward need-to-make-small-talk scenario, I wouldn’t have touched that debate with the proverbial barge pole but in this situation, it was the one safe topic.
Ironic, is it not, that politics is the go-to low-risk conversational opening gambit with a person with whom my relationship is strained to say the least? But I’ve known this couple for a long time, and I knew where they stand. She and her husband, both retired lawyers in their early 70s, are old-school liberals and very politically engaged. They planned their week around that debate, and I knew that this was one topic that I could bring up and be pretty much certain of an overwhelmingly positive response.
And I was not wrong. “Oh my God, did we ever,” she said gleefully, “and she wiped the floor with him.”
“I know,” I said. “It was awesome.”
Something crossed her face just then, very quickly. I think that maybe she had thought that I was a Trumpity Trumpster, and that she expected a very different reaction to her initial reaction, and that she was maybe a little disappointed that she didn’t get that reaction. But then, having established that we were both on the same side in this election (again, I already knew where she stood or I’d never have brought it up in the first place), we spent the next 15 minutes of waning daylight gleefully recounting our favorite moments. We both agreed that the Vice President was this close - THIS CLOSE - to calling Donald Trump a mothereffer, and we applauded her instinct to do so. We mocked Donald Trump’s sad attempt to turn “I’m speaking” into a gotcha moment (I wish that Kamala had chuckled and said “Good one, sir”). And we agreed that the cat and dog eating moment was alternately horrifying and hilarious, but of course that was before a week of bomb threats and school closings made clear that it was not hilarious, and not even slightly funny.
I know for a fact that this woman dislikes me (or at least she did) - a lot - because people have reported back to me. It’s not my imagination. But after a few minutes of debate talk, I wouldn’t have been surprised if she invited me out for a girls’ night. We bonded, I think. We buried the hatchet. If you listen to the news media, then this election is the most divisive in American history, but in my neighborhood, Harris vs. Trump is bringing the people together. Happy days are here again.
No comments:
Post a Comment