mysteryoriley

I still think it’s funny when people don’t know how to allow their eyes to meet and feel okay saying, “Hi”. What’s so threatening about that? Much of the discomfort belongs to our cultural backgrounds, our personal frames of reference, mine making me think this should be so normal. I’m fairly comfortable with the whole meeting-eyes-and-saying-hi thing.

And, then, there’s the waving to someone you know, and finding out it’s someone else – someone you don’t know. Why does that make us wish we were invisible? For some reason, it makes me laugh, and I usually tell the person I didn’t know but waved to, that he or she reminds me of someone I know. That seems to make it all better, especially since it’s true.

Here’s a thought. Maybe we know people on a different level, another plane, and we’re waving to them in that other place where we know them. Maybe when we don’t say hi to someone we do know, but can’t remember from where, it’s because we didn’t really want to know them in the first place. Or, because when we did know them, we weren’t all that comfortable around them. I trust those inside thoughts a lot – the not-saying-hi-because-something-doesn’t-feel-right reaction, and the waving-to-the-stranger-who-looks-like-my-friend thingy. I trust that my eyes can’t always tell my brain what my mind already knows. I have a lot of life experience that says I should always listen to my first thoughts. They’re usually true.

Lately, I’m seeing lots of friends I’ve never met. We say hi. Sometimes we strike up brief conversations in grocery stores or restaurants. Somehow we know we’d be friends if our paths crossed more frequently. And, it’s okay that they don’t.

I’m also acutely aware of people who aren’t friends, but think they know me on a friend level. I don’t wave to them from across restaurants, nor do I say hi to them on sidewalks or at the coffeehouse. I’m not rude, just uninterested in visible acknowledgments of them.

I remember Owen getting such a kick out of this same conversation – the knowing people he’d never met, or knowing he didn’t want to know someone before they’d ever spoken.

He saw the movie, “Stranger than Fiction” shortly before he died, told me I had to see it, that I’d love it. I watched it after he was gone. I loved it. I still do.

Song for the night: Somewhere a Clock is Ticking, Snow Patrol

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKqUf6jy3oM&feature=related

~ by Linda on October 1, 2008.

Posted in child loss, grief, friends, Nat Riley, Owen Riley, Michael Douglas Riley, Linda Siniard, loss, love, children, death, family, grief, learning, Life, mothering, mystery, parenting, writing
Tags: child loss, grief, friends, Nat Riley, Owen Riley, Michael Douglas Riley, Linda Siniard, loss, love, David Tegnell, death, Emmitt Owen Riley, family, friends, grief, Linda Siniard, missing persons, Nat Riley, Owen Riley, Snow Patrol, Somewhere a Clock is Ticking, Stranger than Fiction