Having been prompted internally to use the title above — yes, weird! — I looked up the meaning of both dilly dally and shilly shally, and it turns out both refer ultimately to the idea of wasting time. I’ll let you be the judge of whether or not I wasted my time yesterday.
But first:
Most of my time is spent with myself and puppy Shadow, at my feet, writing these posts, or proceeding with my years’ long archival project, or doing yoga/chikung/taichi, or out on daily walks. Oh, and I have two housemates, and three podmates (house next door in Green Acres Village), but they take their cue from me: a need for both community and individuality. In other words, we don’t eat together, except on special occasions, and then usually with others, having invited all sorts of people to join us. We run our gardens together. Otherwise, especially during winter months, everybody is pretty much on their own.
One of the people in the second house is actually missing, my son Colin Cudmore, ever since August 16, when he suffered a massive aortic dissection that left him paralyzed from the waist down due to loss of blood flow. He has been on a slow, painful, healing journey to wake up the nerves in his legs, and eventually, learn to walk again. He’s in a care home, on the other side of town. I visit once a week, call him every day, and document, also daily, for those who choose to follow his slow, painful, healing journey. See this:
https://www.caringbridge.org/visit/colincudmorehealing
I offer all of the above as backdrop to what happened yesterday, on one of my typical, thrice-weekly, dilly dally shilly shallys out into the world.
I had parked my car at our nearby Aldi (usually I walk, but I had heavy stuff to get) . . .
. . . got out, grabbed my Aldi bag, and happened to glance into the darkened car next to me — and locked into dark eyes peering out at me. What? I looked again; the eyes were those of a large dog, completely silent and still, looking directly at me. WOW.
I started walking towards the store. A friendly woman with two sweet young girl children was walking towards me. “Want this cart?” She asks.
“Yes! Here’s my quarter.”
“No, somebody handed the cart to me.” In other words, she didn’t have to pay either.
Comment: Aldi has this ingenious technology to ensure carts always return to the cart racks. And that is to require a quarter from each person who gets a cart, and then, when they return the cart, to get their quarter back. This has inspired “pay it forward” scenarios between people who either cheerfully release their cart gratis to others without getting their quarter back, or, like this woman, who want to give up their cart with no quarter in return because they didn’t need one in the first place.
I then said to her, when I saw that she stopped to unload at the second car beyond mine, “Oh, I was hoping you were in that car, because there’s an amazing dog in there,” while turning to look at the darkened car just as its front door was opening. (Wow. I didn’t know there was anyone in there!).
A middle-aged man got out and said that he saw me looking at his dog. As he said this he let the dog out, a big, lumbering belgian shepherd, I think he said, built like a small, lumbering bear. All five of us then got together to vie for who got to interact with the happy, squirming dog. The man continued, said that I was one of a number of people who he has seen look at his dog that way (which is why he let the dog out). All of us in an exuberant mood as she then graciously handed me the cart and I headed into the store.
A few minutes later: I am standing with my cart by a wall filled with goodies, thinking about whether I should get some hummus, and suddenly turned around, almost running into an old woman. (Whew! I did not run in to her!)
“Wow!” I gushed, spontaneously. “First you weren’t there, and then you were!” She laughed, said “I get that remark a lot, these days.”
“Well, at our age,” I responded, “we tend to be invisible, so we can live from the inside out rather than the outside in.”
She laughed, agreed, but then pointed to her missing three front teeth and said how glad she was to be getting her new teeth tomorrow. (So I guess she still, at least in part, lives from the outside in, aware of my notice of her missing teeth?) I asked what had happened to her teeth. She had an accident last May, she said, and this will be the last thing on her long road to recovery. “GOOD!” We both laughed and moved on.
BTW: Our interaction had been unusually high energy, turning-heads boisterous, for a grocery store.
Finally, as I was about to leave, placing my new stuff from cart into my Aldi bag at the shelf reserved for such activities, I noticed the soft floppy pants an old man was wearing, and burst out, spontaneously, “I like your pants!” He was taken aback, clearly not expecting anyone to address him for any reason. I repeated: “I like your pants!” He relaxed, and commented, “Oh, these are because when I was in the hospital for open heart surgery, my wife decided to get me pants where I didn’t need to deal with a belt.”
“Good for her!” I said, rejoicing at this indication of how his wife truly cares for him.
So, while it looks like I was out shopping for food, actually I was exemplifying what I consider the most profound Truth.
What we are doing on this planet is “moving stuff around.”
And it’s always an excuse for relationships.