Excuse me, Sir. I don’t mean to be disrespectful, and I don’t mean to be rude. But there are some things you ought to be aware of.
You should know, for example, that the brain of that moth that you never would have noticed, the one squashed on the grill of your Mercedes SUV, is an intricate and beautiful thing.
It is more wondrous by far than the circuit board of your Blackberry, than the first-quarter marketing plan sitting in your buckskin portfolio.
You should know that the old woman you cursed at?the one with the red vinyl coat who crossed too slowly in front of you when you were late for a meeting at the office?that woman was once a ballet dancer whose jetes and battements-glise once caused audiences in Paris and Milan to hold their collective breath in darkened halls.
You should know that the Vietnamese street kid who asked if she could squeegee your windows, the one you told to ?fuck off and get a job,? is up at six o?clock every morning getting her kid sister ready for school. When she has enough money to buy a coffee, she sits at a table in the window of the Starbucks across the street from your office building (if you were ever to take the trouble to look down from that great height, you might just see the top of her pink-dyed head).
She sits in the window and sketches pictures of flowers, of gargoyles, of faces (lonely, laughing, haunted and talking) passing by. She uses a sketch pad and stub of graphite given to her by her grade nine art teacher the week after she slashed her wrists for the second time, the week before she was kicked out of school for showing up stoned. Not that it matters, but she pays more attention to the terrible beauty all around her than you ever will, or ever could.
You should know that the 12-year-old boy in his bedroom in your four-thousand square foot North Van rancher, the boy you never had much time for, is going to surprise you in ways you never could have imagined. You should know that the woman sitting alone in the darkened living room is making plans of her own.
You should know that the world is strange, and it is vibrant, and it is awful. And there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your regional managers? quarterly reports.
