reclusive extrovert

I’m sitting here with the laptop on a sagging old sofa on a tumbledown verandah while F is inside having his clarinet lesson, after school. 

His teacher G is a groovy young guy. He's the one I heard busking at the market, whose  clarinet sounds like heaven.  I seem to be completely invisible to  him  -  I'm a grey, middle-aged parentish sort of person of no interest whatever. Not that I  care, as long as F is having a good time in there. 

I can hear the two of them jamming inside the house.  The Pink Panther. 

This sofa smells of dog and beer and  old ashtrays. I suspect G smokes dope and drinks a lot of  beer, but no matter. Now I can hear them discussing which are the best songs for busking. F has mentioned that he plans to busk up at Eumundi Market this w/end. 

G is advising  him on ‘songs old people like’  - old people being the most likely to throw money in the hat. Well I’m glad we are good for something.  

Apparently ‘old people’ like a song called  ‘Strangers on the Shore’.  G is telling F he doesn’t really like the song that much, but old people really love it....

No, they’ve abandoned that tack, thank goodness, and gone back to The Pink Panther & Girl From Ipanema.

Yes, I am eavesdropping.

I’ve been eavesdropping half the day. The only client I had today cancelled, so I sat  at the cafe sipping green tea & working on the laptop. To avoid being at home and having to interact with the gardening crew. Ridiculous huh?

In the cafe I overheard two lots of  latte-sipping people referring to  the fact that Mercury is Retrograde.

Last night we (F & I)  went to a share dinner  for M’s birthday. When we arrived there was someone else getting out of a car in the dark, fumbling around like us with a casserole etc. We reached the lit up front porch of M’s house together. Where do I know you from? Oh, yes, the gym, different context...

She is one of the people I doggedly ignore every morning at 6 a.m.. ( or used to ignore,  when I still went to gym). Of course it has to be admitted that  I ignore pretty much everyone at gym. Because I just want to pedal my bike and listen to my podcasts and not talk. There’s a  chatty early morning gym camaraderie from which I hold myself  firmly aloof. Quick hello then on with the iPod ear plugs.

I also have to admit it, I have had a vaguely irritated feeling towards this woman, the way she lifts weights and uses those stretchy leg-extender things so energetically. 

You know what I’m going to say, don’t you? Lesson one thousand and one about making judgements about people who subsequently turn out to be nothing like what I’d projected onto them. She’s nice. She’s sitting next to me at  the long candlelit dinner table;  and if she is a little less than hugely friendly towards me I can’t say I blame her. I’m aware of myself trying to somehow compensate for my previous unfriendliness. I am a nice person too, honestly. 

Hmm. I’ve just noticed a little theme here. Hiding in cafes, plugging in the earphones.  The reclusive  extrovert.

Lesson’s over,  gotta go