Who are YOU?

I go up to Powder Magazine Hill most days, sometimes only as a shortcut over the hill down to the village, sometimes to meditate at sunrise or sunset, regularly to exercise my pets. I seldom meet other people there and have come to bristle with proprietary irritation when the tracks of a tourist’s car are left there after a weekend. Most local walkers I have met have been equally relieved to nod hello and dash off in any other direction to avoid Chatting. But today an old man totters up fussily and comes to where I’m sitting on the step of the small stone Powder Magazine building and starts to poke about with his stick amongst the weeds sprouting there.

He jumps right in. Good rain we’ve had. The roads are a mess hey? Are you the new hairdresser?

I don’t say anything for a while, because I am practicing being Less Chatty, but I am also practicing being Less Rude. Social anxiety makes me inclined to unleashing bursts of rapid-fire information: info dumping, oversharing. I don’t say: Actually, my mother was a hairdresser and I have spent my life living in close proximity to one or several hairdressers, but I am not one. I don’t say that I’m up there today because I have panic attacks, or that I usually walk with my two black rescue dogs and only one cat comes with us and he is the white cat that has just gotten cancer. I don’t tell him that I love history, particularly South African geo-social history and that I have a bit of a crush on Piet Retief. Or that-by the way-I have come to the conclusion after years of research that Retief was impotent because of too much horse riding. I don’t tell him that I once worked in Sandton and have a legitimate phobia of driving a motor car, or that I bought a ridiculous pair of red shoes twenty years ago for the equivalent of today’s minimum wage. I could say that I am a descendent of the people who made this little village, or ask him if he agrees that Boston is the greatest rock band of all time. I don’t tell him that it breaks my heart that people haven’t got any manners anymore.

I know his next question will be who am I, if I’m not the hairdresser? He has already appraised me and found me perfectly fitting for the profession into which he has me neatly slotted. I have purple hair, and I know he’ll crow in the pub later that he’s met the new lass in town who looks like she’s been slapped about with a wet comic book because of all my tattoos. I’m tempted to tell him I’m an accountant at the university, just to watch him flounder in disbelief, and am stopped only by the fear that he is an accountant himself and that he will immediately engage in chatter that involves Maths and catch me at my lie. Gossip spreads so quickly. Just recently someone put it about that I write pornographic novels and vote for the EFF, and it got me chucked off almost everyone’s party lists. Such a fuss it was, naughty scandalmongers! I do wish sometimes that the porn novels bit were true; I’m told it is the most lucrative genre in modern literature. I consider claiming it to the old man standing with me on Powder Magazine Hill, but he is so very old and seems unsteady on his feet; I’m not sure he will make it back down the hill to his house to pass such a delicious titbit into the bush telegraph system.

I’m cross with the man, but I know him; I have always known him in one form or another, it is not this individual’s fault. And I am working very hard on Letting Go these days. Not being Cross About Things, resentful about a life spent so diligently trying to slot neatly into some divine filing system. To be constrained to monopathy. British artist and writer Robert Twigger coined the word “monopath”: “It means a person with a narrow mind, a one-track brain, a bore, a super-specialist, an expert with no other interests — in other words, the role-model of choice in the Western world.”[i] I don’t say all this to the old bloke.

In the end I tell him I’m not the new hairdresser, and I say that he looks very dapper and certainly doesn’t appear to need a haircut. And I ask him if it isn’t terribly, terribly sad about The Queen.

In Time Enough for Love (1973)[ii], Robert A. Heinlein wrote:

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”

[i] https://aeon.co/essays/we-live-in-a-one-track-world-but-anyone-can-become-a-polymath

[ii] Time Enough for Love is a science fiction novel by American writer Robert A. Heinlein, first published in 1973. The work was nominated for the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1973 and both the Hugo and Locus Awards in 1974. [Wikipedia]

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