lesson 31: assaulting old ladies during dinner sometimes pays off

"Not again!"

"Well not literally."

"Oh... I thought..."

"Yeah well. I'm going to make this one short. I'm tired."

"Boohoo to you."

"Don't be mean. I'm not in the mood to be clever. And before you say anything more I'll go on with my story."

"Fine then. I won't say anything. I'll just glare at you. Silently judging your every word."

"Fine."

"Fine."

"You said something about silent? So by the time I was in my early 30s I had gone on quite a few vacations by myself. At first, I was kind of caught up in the romance of it... traveling on your own, no agenda to follow, just doing what you wanted to do by yourself. And for the most part, I really loved it. But I was on this one autumn vacation on PEI following a breakup and it wasn't so great."

...silent judgment...

"I was fine during the day when I was busy..."

...brief suspension of silent judgment... "Busy on PEI in the fall. Doing what? Visiting the great historic monuments? Or attending those famous PEI cultural events?"

"Don't knock PEI, it's beautiful... but hardly, erm, distracting. By the third day I was so frantically lonely I ended up asking this group of old ladies if I could eat with them. They looked a little frightened, since I was probably pretty aggressive."

"I don't think that old ladies is politically correct."

"Whatever happened to the silent judgment?"

"It's done."

"I should have put money on it."

"You should have."

"The whole time we were eating together..."

"They actually let you join them."

"Actually. The whole time we were eating dinner, they kept telling me how in awe of me they were, of my ability to travel by myself and how that would have been impossible when they were young. How lucky I was to be free and on my own."

"Snort. In awe of you. Niiice ego stroke."

"And all I wanted to do was weep and tell them about my sad and lonely heart. By the way, I don't think that you are supposed to say 'snort'."

"The truth is somewhere in between."

"Yep."

"This wasn't that short."