often times, i find myself taking conversations so literally that i can get lost in details and miss out on the big picture. please allow me to share the following example: the story of crazy at the dog park.
the setting was a neighborhood dog park in the level opening at the base of a hiking trail. it was february and the snow was deep enough to require some serious footwear, yet not too deep as to trouble the dogs.
an older woman, dressed in a long sleeved tie-dyed shirt, sans jacket but equipped with a pretty hefty scarf, approached my perch on the picnic table. her pen-on-a-string swayed to and fro as her long legs marched deliberately through the snow.
polite chit chat ensued, nice nice blah blah.
then she says 'the good thing about all this snow is how it freezes the biems in the ground, even when they're still hot.'
trying not to show my confusion, i attempt to process this statement. did she just tell me she freezes bagels in the ground? does she reheat them or just eat them frozen? is there some sort of 'end of days' bagel stash outside her house?
you see, when she said biem, i heard bialy, somehow mispronounced. for those of you who might not know, this is a bialy:
a weird bagel with no hole. completely unacceptable if you ask me, but that's not the issue.
only after days of pondering the strange conversation, did i realize that she mean bm, not biem. bm for bowel movement.
she was talking about how nice it was that the snow freezes her dog's poo, thus making it easier to pick up. i, however, was completely unaware of this at the time. i asked her questions about how rapid the freezing process was, depending on the size and other factors. i even went so far as to ask how often she tried that method, and with any other things.
we had this parallel conversation in which we talked about two very different things for close to ten minutes. she was happy to oblige my inquiries and seemed to get more excited the longer we talked.
if my clever little monster hadn't chosen the perfect moment to attack her poor, ragged looking mutt, i might still be there now discussing the energy efficient option of using snow as a freezer.
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