The Scrivener: Somewhere, Now And Then
…She announced the total and turned to talk to another colleague. I had a small query, which she answered. I paid for my purchases. She gave my change and called out, 'Next please' while again writing in her little book. At no time during our brief encounter did she look at me. When I got back to the car, I had a quick look in the mirror to make sure I was there…
Brian Barratt finds out what it is like to be neither here nor there.
To read more of Brian’s extraordinarily satisfying columns please click on The Scrivener in the menu on this page, then add to your pleasure by visiting his Web site The Brain Rummager www.alphalink.com.au/~umbidas/
It happened again. I was invisible. Or perhaps I wasn't there. Just for a few minutes. I was standing in the queue at the quick checkout in the supermarket. A voice called out, 'Next please'. Nobody was looking at me, but one counter was vacant, so I approached it. The lady behind the counter was busily writing something in a little book. She put her pen down, started talking to her colleague, and at the same time whisked my purchases through the price scanning thing.
She announced the total and turned to talk to another colleague. I had a small query, which she answered. I paid for my purchases. She gave my change and called out, 'Next please' while again writing in her little book. At no time during our brief encounter did she look at me. When I got back to the car, I had a quick look in the mirror to make sure I was there.
Perhaps we have to define exactly where 'there' is. On the wireless and on the computer, people talk or write about, 'You people out there', or, 'Is there anyone out there who...?', or they include a horribly overworked cliché: 'You guys out there'. If everyone else is out there, where are these people who are not out there? I imagine that they're each in a little box of their own, alone, lonely, and longing for human company.
At least, that's what I imagined until today. I've just read a letter in a magazine in which the writer pleads, 'For goodness' sake, there are those of us out there who want to see something of real beauty on the cover'. This person is obviously in a quite different sort of little box. It is not a matter of being one of 'us out here' but 'us out there'. Perhaps s/he exists in two boxes simultaneously, one 'here' and one 'there'.
Maybe that's what happened to me at the supermarket. While I stood 'there', and thought I was 'here', the lady behind the counter did not see me 'there' from her own viewpoint of 'here'. Her little box and my little box were evidently on different planes of existence, understood only by scientists and mathematicians who delve into the extra dimensions of space-time.
I'll just have to console myself with the fact that I know I am here, typing these words, and hope that you, out there, will read them. Aha, but therein lies another problem. I am typing them now but you will be reading them some time after I've typed them. Your 'now' will occur long after my 'now'. I shall be invisible to you. So that proves my point, doesn't it? . . . .Doesn't it?
© Copyright Brian Barratt 2008
Brian wrote about his invisibility and Einstein's equation in 'Mushrooms', The Scrivener, 10 February 2006.
http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2006/02/mushrooms_1.php#more
