There are times when even I must wonder about my own self and the security of my sanity in a world that to me seems best described as more wonderful imagined in the boundless confines of my cerebellum than in the infinite variety of reality. To wit:
A week or so ago I was on one of my morning runs when I saw a bit of poster with the words “FOUND!” and a picture of handsome chap of a dog with a telephone number prominently listed below it. Now you dear reader, I will presume, may already have digested this chunk of information and come forth with in no haste but to a rock solid and irreconcilably logical conclusion that I will shortly reveal I sailed right past. I thought then at that moment how excited the child must have been to have finally had their best furry friend back that they then proceeded to replace all their LOST! posters with FOUND! posters. And more so, they even left a telephone number so citizens such as myself might call them up to congratulate them and tell them how grand it is indeed to have found what was once lost. And dear reader, and you are ever so dear are you not since you are indeed reading my blog, do not fret as I did not call said child, but if I had I would have shared with them my excitement for their reunion even while I thought to learn them a bit about how others might perceive them as off their rocker in sharing in such a public and indiscriminate a manner and even though I find such actions completely defensible in a manner reserved for universal logics and other such truths. In a word, I would have called them up because they are, to me, a child after my own heart.
Forward to two days back when I saw a similar poster along GreenLake. But this time I turned to my friend and mentioned that it was the second such poster I had seen. And of course, in the intervening days since my first encounter I still felt oddly compelled to call them to congratulate them even though I felt admittedly awkward to do so. More over, my only additional thought from the first encounter was that these posters were not for me but for all those other dog lovers who they feared would continue to fret about a wayward pet and wished to inform them that they could now rest assured that all was well. Alas my friend, who it seems is a more mature and worldly person than I, informed me that such posters were put up by people who had found a lost pet and not by an owner who had been since been reunited with a lost pet. Not till then had I seen into the mirror and realized there was another side, a juxtaposition of sorts of two roles. To my mind it is such a subtle thing. Both are finders. One is celebrating the reunion. One is trying to evince a reunion by leaving their phone number. Sublimely deviated really are they not?
It is on days like this when my world seems so different than everyone else’s. And the next thing I know people will tell their sky is really blue and clouds truly white, not the pin-striped skies and polka-dot clouds that I see. In some ways I might learn to acquiesce myself of this view of the world but only as long as stop signs continue to taste like hot cinnamon firebomb candy balls.
