After a profound day roughing-out sculpture up on the hill, I stopped in at the grocery store for some provisions. I was in my work attire: pigtails ringleted by water and slightly grayed by stone dust; jeans, fleece, and work boots, all in shades of dusty grey and face marginally wiped clean with whatever drinking water was left behind in the cup. I was tired, content, and moving uncharacteristically slow, having just come off a 12 day cleanse (yes there was food, but limited).
Lunch had been forfeited because the day was extra fun so I was conserving what energy I had and looking forward to eating the apple that I placed in my cart, when I noticed a man was watching me. This by itself is not much of a story as men have been watching women since we evolved to become more complex organisms so understandably, I didn’t think much of it.
I stood in line with my shopping stuffs laid out when this same man arrived behind me in the kiosk and laid his shopping out. We stood there looking at each others groceries for a moment when he asked me if I wouldn’t mind telling him where the dirt on my hands came from. I told him and he replied that he too carved stone and recognized the signs, or rather the symptoms. We chatted briefly until the clerk apologetically interrupted to give me my bill summary. When she apologized for interrupting, I cheerfully replied, “It’s ok, no big deal,” to which the man on my left said, “Actually, it’s very important.” I paused and thought, yes, he was right. In this age of disconnect, in these times when we consume merely for the sake of consumption; often giving no thought to how things arrive, where they are made and who’s hands (and how many hands) toiled to give us too much of all our stuff. The affirmation of this importance is signified by the meeting of a stranger in a grocery store. One of those rare strangers with a passion for using his hands to create with material that is mined from the earth, material formed in times when men did not exist let alone spend time in grocery stores watching women.
