The very ugly man

I was at our community’s wonderful free folk music festival this past weekend.  There were three days of music and community activities which were totally brilliant!  We had among other great talents three bands from Woodstock, and Steve Earle doing his thing.  Since I am a people watcher event like this are almost too much for my sensory system.  It is very exciting and interesting at the same time.  A lot of the audience are old hippies and some are young hippies too.  The music fans come out and even people who would not be part of this music scene are there tapping their fingers and toes.  The event was peaceful and since it is a folk music festival it was a group of overwhelmingly nice people.

There was a very obese woman of about 50 years of age who sat near me, she caught my people watching eyes since just about a half hour before the event she had accepted the responsibility of a foster child from the children’s fund who was there looking for sponsors for children in the developing world.  She did not look like a rich woman to me, but she had a man with her and another woman and you could tell that she was very important to them.  She smiled and chatted with them and the man gently touched her from time to time.  Not long after the this I was surprised however to see one of the ugliest events of my life unfold.  The lady got up at some time during the show, perhaps to go to the bathroom.  When she was returning I noticed that she stumbled and nearly fell.  My sudden urge was to try and catch her, but I knew in an instant that she way too far away and even if this was the case that she was far too big for me to catch.  Thankfully though she did however remain standing, catching herself before she fell, and therefore safe.  I breathed a sigh of relief since I am sure if she would have fallen on those little folding chairs that she would have really been badly hurt.  

Then I saw it.  A grown man who sat behind her with a beautiful exotic looking blonde woman on his arm. making fun of her for her obesity, laughing, puffing up his scarred cheeks.  I knew that if I could hear him, that she could too.  It was so ugly what he did, so mean spirited that the woman beside him tried to ignore him, dissociate herself from him.  What I wanted her to do was to stand up and scream at him.  To say “you are an ugly person – so ugly on the inside that it exudes out of you”  I looked at him as he sat chorkling, still not getting it, puffing his cheeks.  This man of about forty years of age and I wondered what was coming to him for his meanness of heart.  

Steve Earle continued to sing and it was lovely to hear him, but this man’s hate of the large woman is still with me.  How can anyone be so ugly to another person based only on the way that they look?  What could he possibly be getting out of this hatred?  Is there a pay back?

Off to visit grandma

I won’t be in town for the next week because I am visiting grandma.  She is an amazingly cool and interesting woman but she is not internet connected, so I cannot check in while I am with her.

We will spend the week chatting about nearly everything and I plan to record her with my handy dandy little digital miracle.  She was an early feminist, my grandma.  The first woman on the National Farm Union on a federal level.  The only woman at the conferences in the 1950s.  A speaker, a protester, an active representative who worked door to door warning people about the environment, farming practice, huge multi national food companies like Kraft.  

Today, anyone who reads can see the problems caused by ignoring that warning.  Obesity, the crap we are eating, unsustainable agricultural practices, green house gas, it all has to do with a lack of disinterest in the things that my little grandmother tried to tell us about. I bet you wish that your parents would have listened to that little woman who knocked at your door.  

I listened and I don’t feel guilty today.  Never drove a car, bought local, avoided packaged food.