Today, I was talking with Tex, one of our Sales gentlemen. He is very sweet and fairly talented, though still reasonably inexperienced--new to the post, and all that. He and I have an easy manner of teasing as one might have with friends, or good coworkers. As is also the manner of even the softest gentleman, he is also sharp on occasion, given over to what I have recently labelled as "north crudity"... comments that are meant to be amusing but are responsible for the slight pull one feels when insulted.
I have learned, and skillfully I hope, to smile through these hurts, which heretofore I have dismissed as petty. Let not them settle, it is how people interact, always searching a pecking order, always treating things with suspicion and contempt.
Today, he was talking to Kirk, or so I believed. Per result, I had dedicated my attention to the story I was reading after the most cursory of examinations--until I looked up and heard him say, "Well, then, Payton's always on her own little page, aren't'cha?"
I smiled, shrugged. "Alas, such is my habit," I said gently.
Kirk had crossed next to me, talking to Tex, and now the slightest of tightening on the paperwork in his hands, perceiving offense, though I hadn't bothered to take any.
"I'm sure you meant that in a positive way," he said, with the slightest of edges, "Because Payton is one of the most extraordinary human beings I've ever met."
Slowly, I looked up at him, abandoning the pretense of work. He's always kind, a great friend with a great wife, but nobody's ever stuck up for me before. Tex started slightly, apparently catching he wasn't fucking around.
"It must be hard to leave up to your headgear," he said, shrugging towards the sky in theatrical despair--teasing me again--and I smiled again, accepting what I believed to be an implied apology.
"A goal to which I confess myself unequal," I said, wrinkling my nose in humor. "Ah, such a trial!"
The discussion trailed back into work.
I'm not going to forget that. I'm still startled over it, have not even come to terms with it. For all the things friends say to one another, and I hope we are friends, I am unused to people coming to my aid, or caring at all on the consequence of language. To people discussing music and books with me, over-exuberant as I am, and commending that care instead of disqualifying it with dismissal. It's okay to be a voracious reader, okay to feel things too deeply, okay to wear hats and not-quite-conventional clothes, carry old words and legends in my silver heart. Okay to be a white witch.
I have never heard these things, but since I've come home, almost all of them have been assured to me by Kirk. I am unable to express gratitude in a manner befitting the gesture, unable to give him something in equal value to sheer kindness and valor in the face of trouble. I hope he knows this as he knew to say such kind things in the first place....
Then, who better than a writer to know that?
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