Down Pour
It seemed like a good idea, at the local, coffee hubbub spot, and the couch looked inviting. Cupping my warm, decaf latte, decorated with an ornate leaf, I inquired whether or not the empty chair, near the couch, was available. It was 10:00 a.m., midday, midweek, in suburban Seattle, a scratch and an itch away from Microsoft Corporation, and I was tired from my Physical Therapy session.
I was invited directly onto the couch by a sixty plus year old, vibrant, woman with short gray hair and dangling earrings, “Sit down here, I kept the seat warm for you!” She was in a deep conversation, with a twentysomething, about progressive values. My plan had been to engage with my SmartPhone, ignore the conversation happening next to me, while sipping my delicious latte, in its pretty, porcelain cup, all based on behavior from my Midwestern upbringing. The dynamic duo was having no part of my silence, and their conversation begged for attention. Sigh. I was drawn in, slowly, but surely.
For the next hour, I was to learn that in the non-profit world, and various trainings, being open, was very critical. The twentysomething was proud of the fact that, before the morning break, the workshop allowed you to know so much about one another, “And that was how we bonded!” Email was pulling me away, into the depths of messages, both important and unimportant. I was considering a critical life decision, at that very moment, and all of my personal filters were flipped to the off button. The conversation drone on, and it made me think of all of the educational philosophy photo- shopped into my brain, by the thousands of classes, workshops, and books, devoured in the past twenty years.
The twentysomething continued to chirp about how great it was to stand on a line in the center of the room near peers. “And this way, you knew if she had been abused as a child or by her lover.” My chit chat was banal, at that juncture, a feeling out of the tides of change, but the questions were definitely simmering in my mind. In education, the process had been to put children, teens, on that line in the middle of room. How can you understand another unless you walk in their shoes? On and on the conversation went, the emails were getting less interesting, and suddenly, without GPS, the conversation turned to gender. “Can you explain gender to me?” I asked as I suddenly looked up from my email. “I just don’t get it.”
After an explanation that I do, in fact, understand gender, as a term, like pink and blue, yet the seismic shift regarding the grander place in the world mystifies. Suddenly, as if from a bolt, out of the blue, the woman left for a meeting, only to be replaced by her friend. The older woman and I are peers, we understand boundaries, and time as an actual thing. It was a tag team moment, where friend one replaced friend two, without introduction, to let me know that important things in life now include how emails are organized, gender allows for more choices, “Isn’t that confusing?” I queried, and that branding is everything. It somehow became clear that friend two was the daughter of my couch mate, “Welcome to my world!” my friend stated. “It all really started after all the divorces happened.” My seat was plenty warm and it was time to go home.
The conversation mulled and festered in my mind until the Presidential Election, and then it began to make sense. Our genderless world is now fueled by a digital divide, without boundaries and privacy, and it is not going back.
Later that evening, I would see these women again, at a debate gathering, for the election of the first woman president. It would be out of context, and surprising, like a welcomed gentle mist. It was reassuring to know that we all share the same universe, no matter what.
