17 July 2026 – Small, thoughtful child levels her eyes at me.
“I like your hat.”
“Thank you!”
“I like the bird.”
“Me too! He’s a chickadee.”
“And I like the smiley face.”
“What smiley face?”
She sighs, presented with yet another example of the inability of adults to see what is right in front of their eyes.
I suddenly feel like St-Exupéry’s aviator, being schooled once again by the Little Prince.
“Take off your hat.” (I obey.) “Look.” (I look.)
Still at one with the St-Ex aviator, I implore you: go look at your hat.
You may not have a chickadee. But you just might have a smiley face.
WALKING WOMAN 
araneus1
/ 17 July 2026Excellent!
Sitting at the doctors waiting for a flu shot. Old bloke (as old as me) sits next to me. “I love your hair”, he says. (I let my hair grow for the winter then didn’t get it cut for the summer and now it’s winter again and my hair is down past my shoulders) “Thanks, but I can’t take credit for it, it’s genetic,” I say, but he doesn’t want to let it go. He is mourning his long lost hair, and I get it. I’m lucky, despite the myriad of things that do not work or hurt like hell, I sit have hair, but only just. It has started to recede, so I thought I’d give it a last hurrah.
We talk for while and he tells me about his best mate who has dementia. I tell him that most of my mates are dead and the ones who aren’t give me crap because I have hair. We both laugh. He gets called in for his flu shot, but asks me why he is going first even though I was there first. “They always choose the handsome ones first” I say.
As he comes out, we bump fists. Two blokes who just met.
I’ll probably never see him again, but for those few moments, we were two old blokes sharing our lives.
Not as much fun as interacting with kids, but you take what you can get.
icelandpenny
/ 18 July 2026Well worth taking. All these interaction moments are worth taking. Thanks for telling me about it.
Lynette d'Arty-Cross
/ 17 July 2026That’s such a lovely story, Penny. I wear baseball hats (when I have to wear one because I really don’t like hats at all) so there’s no smiley face, unfortunately.
restlessjo
/ 19 July 2026I’m sad! I don’t have a smiley face. Well… only the one on my face xx
araneus1
/ 19 July 2026It’s a sunny Sunday afternoon. After a bit of grocery shopping, I decide to walk around the shops at Upwey. I met a happy dog and a friendly owner. “Do you have a dog?” he asks. “I used to,” I reply. “Oh,” he says.
I push on up the street, and I see a gaggle of small children heading my way on little bikes. These days, I’m not that quick at getting out of the way of erratic ankle-biters, so I try to sum up my chances of survival.
I head right, and the first bike goes left. So far so good.
The tiny rider says something as she approaches, but I don’t catch it. She repeats her greeting as she sails by. “Hello, random old man.”
“G’day dude,” I reply with a large smile on my face.
Several steps later, I encounter the main clutch (what is the collective noun for small children on bikes?) of children and their mum.
“Apparently, I’m a ‘random old man’,” I tell the mum.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry. She’s so funny.”
She didn’t ask which kid said it, SHE KNEW EXACTLY which kid said it.
“No need to apologise, I loved it,” I said, and I laughed as I said it.
My hip was very sore, but that encounter made me forget my discomfort.
icelandpenny
/ 19 July 2026It gets better & better (you random old chronicler, you). Maybe the collective noun could be: a cycle of children? Children’s use of vocabulary can stop us in our tracks. Cf. that child throwing in “random” — quite randomly, I’ll add. Brings to mind the member of a school class on the Art Gallery of Ontario balcony, when the kiddies were asked to look up at the ceiling of glulam parabolas, and say what it reminded them of. The stock answer is “overturned canoe” and sometimes “a turtle’s back.” This child was having none of it. “An armadillo,” she said firmly. The teacher was nonplussed.
araneus1
/ 19 July 2026“A cycle of children”. I love it!