What’s Wanted

 [Written in about 2003]

What’s Wanted

     D. O. (of the Nameless Nannies)

“People are hungry for characters,” my sister informs me in the restaurant as we sit down in the corner booth at the Marion Street McDonald’s. The waitress behind the counter has just barked at us, implying who knows what, like maybe that I should have ordered at least the Sausage and Egg McMuffin meal instead of just Egg McMuffin with nothing else. The waitress, who is fifty or so, informs us (my sister having initiated the conversation by asking her a question or commenting to her about something) when she delivers a few packages of hashbrowns to the next table a few minutes later, that this is her last day here. She’s quitting after thirteen years. 

     My sister exchanges pleasantries with her.

“It’s hard leaving a place isn’t it,” my sister says in a loud voice. The waitress agrees. “She is hurt today. That’s why she’s so loud,” my sister informs me in quite a loud voice herself when the waitress leaves. “She doesn’t mind being loud and hurt and making people feel uncomfortable. The world needs characters,” my sister says again. “We are hungry for oddity.”

     Is the world hungry for blind characters? People don’t like blind people. Not even if they are characters. Especially if they are characters. A blind character wouldn’t get the time of day from anyone. He’d be immediately forgotten, if not ignored from the start. People don’t tolerate blind people. It makes no difference if they are characters.

     Or short people. Even if you have a short person who is a character. Let’s say he’s three foot four and wears the most gaudy ties and vibrantly-coloured, expensive, leather shoes, red one day, green the next. Say he leaps up in class and shouts questions of a provocative and intelligent sort at the professor who is shy and not outstanding in any way at all. Who will care? Who will be his friend? Will the girl in the front, the very pretty one who wears those tight earth-toned sweaters and who has those twinkling eyes the colour off blue slate, take notice of him? Will she turn around, make eye contact, and after class arrange to meet him for coffee to see what sort of guy he is? No, she won’t. Of course not. She is not interested in characters. Especially not short ones.