Among the people I have difficulty with are the Chatty Cathies of the world, anyone who fails to respect boundaries or assumes a friendship that doesn't exist, people who don't like animals, and anyone who reminds me of my mother. And in one fell swoop, I have met someone who is all of that and more.
She shuffles through the door each morning, a hulking figure in un-ironed clothes, walking with her shoulders hunched over and her arms swinging at her sides. Cruel or not, an image from Planet of the Apes forces its way into my mind. She mutters something that might or might not be a good morning and then, with the first of many heavy sighs, eases her considerable bulk into a chair. It's not a promising start to the morning. Soon there will be a long litany of aches and pains - her shoulder, her gall bladder, the side effects of her new medicine. This will expand to her mother's new thoracic surgeon, the price of tires at Walmart, her husband's ineptitude at caring for her child, last night's dinner of hamburger with seared onions, her nephew's latest haircut ( including a picture from her cell phone ), a recipe for pineapple and mandarin orange cake, her brother's tragic suicide ( 23 years ago ), each and every detail of her child's sinus infection and all the flaws of contemporary day care. It's wearying, irrelevant, distracting and endless. All of which, I am surprisingly slow to realize, would be little more than a nuisance but for the striking resemblance she bears to my mother and worse, my reaction to it. She rolls her chair close to mine to peer over my shoulder or ask a question, and I instinctively pull away. I flinch when she casually pats my shoulder, avoiding eye contact is a reflex, and I find myself feeling faintly queasy at the sight of her fat fingers and chewed nails.
We are not sisters, soulmates or friends, just two very different people who - for better or worse - share a small workplace. As my good friend from New England has advised me, I need only to be fair and not treat her badly due to a quirk of fate and an unfortunate resemblance to a dead woman.
Perhaps irony is no more than God's sense of humor, a reminder that you can't outrun the past even when the past is six feet under.
She shuffles through the door each morning, a hulking figure in un-ironed clothes, walking with her shoulders hunched over and her arms swinging at her sides. Cruel or not, an image from Planet of the Apes forces its way into my mind. She mutters something that might or might not be a good morning and then, with the first of many heavy sighs, eases her considerable bulk into a chair. It's not a promising start to the morning. Soon there will be a long litany of aches and pains - her shoulder, her gall bladder, the side effects of her new medicine. This will expand to her mother's new thoracic surgeon, the price of tires at Walmart, her husband's ineptitude at caring for her child, last night's dinner of hamburger with seared onions, her nephew's latest haircut ( including a picture from her cell phone ), a recipe for pineapple and mandarin orange cake, her brother's tragic suicide ( 23 years ago ), each and every detail of her child's sinus infection and all the flaws of contemporary day care. It's wearying, irrelevant, distracting and endless. All of which, I am surprisingly slow to realize, would be little more than a nuisance but for the striking resemblance she bears to my mother and worse, my reaction to it. She rolls her chair close to mine to peer over my shoulder or ask a question, and I instinctively pull away. I flinch when she casually pats my shoulder, avoiding eye contact is a reflex, and I find myself feeling faintly queasy at the sight of her fat fingers and chewed nails.
We are not sisters, soulmates or friends, just two very different people who - for better or worse - share a small workplace. As my good friend from New England has advised me, I need only to be fair and not treat her badly due to a quirk of fate and an unfortunate resemblance to a dead woman.
Perhaps irony is no more than God's sense of humor, a reminder that you can't outrun the past even when the past is six feet under.
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