My Life

[Content Note: Street harassment; ageism; fat hatred.]

This weekend, I was standing out on my front porch, peering at the robins' nest from a distance, trying to see if the eggs had hatched yet. It's important to note that while I was doing this very mundane thing, I was wearing a very mundane pink t-shirt and a very mundane pair of blue jeans. I was barefoot. My hair was tousled, not looking particularly stylish or particularly unstylish. Just a middle-aged white lady, standing outside her small and unremarkable home, looking at a birds' nest.

My neighbor, a white man in his 90s, was bent over in the middle of his front lawn, doing a little gardening around a tree. He was wearing a very mundane plaid shirt and a very mundane pair of khaki trousers while doing this mundane task in front of his small and unremarkable home.

I looked in the direction of my neighbor's home, opposite the direction of the nest, when I heard loud, almost shouted, laughter. It was coming from a young white man, hanging half out the window of a grey truck with a camper back. "HA HA HA!" he shout-laughed. "OLD MAN!" He started the shout-laughing again before he caught site of me and yelled: "OH MY GOD! FAT CHICK! HA HA HA! FAT CHICK, TOO!" This all happened in a moment, as the truck cruised by our homes. I looked back at him, curiously, as he shouted: "OLD MAN AND FAT CHICK! SCORE!"

The driver of the vehicle, presumably his friend or brother, another young white man, high-fived him. They laughed raucously. What a great day! An old man AND a fat chick! Out on their lawns. Living life.

SCORE.

I wasn't even angry, or hurt, or...anything really. It was like watching a context-less scene from one of David Lynch's early shorts, if David Lynch shot in over-saturated color and hated people. Confusing.

I just watched the scene, almost as if I weren't a part of it, and the first conscious thought I had was that it would be perfect if someone drove by listening to a David Byrne song, any David Byrne song, really loudly, right at that moment. But nobody did. It was just the sound of more cars passing, as the young men's laughter faded into the distance.

My neighbor didn't even look up. His hearing is fine. He has had almost 100 years of trying to make sense of a young man laughing at an old man. Maybe he has decided it doesn't make sense no matter how much time you spend on it, or maybe he remembers being a young man who laughed at old men once; maybe it makes all kinds of sense to him. Either way, he didn't react—at least in no way I could discern from my bit of grass.

I guess I probably looked like I didn't react, too. Because I just turned my face back to the birds, and went on about my mundane business precisely as I'd been the moment before. But I was thinking about what it must be like to be the kind of person who gets so excited about the hilarity (?) of seeing an old man and a fat chick just being in their front yards. I was thinking about how you get to be the kind of person who has your own image, people who look like you, avatars for "normal humankind," reflected back at you so thick, so undiluted with human diversity, that just seeing a person who is older than you, or fatter than you, or a different gender than you, is notable. And strange. And funny.

And I was thinking about how it is people just like the guys who passed me in the truck—"FAT CHICK! SCORE!"—who routinely filter my life through their validity prisms to find my perceptions wanting, despite a lack of empathy so cavernous that the mere sight of me is like finding an easter egg in a video game.

Soon the thought fell away, and I went back to standing on the tips of my bare toes, trying to spy a hint of blue eggs in the nest.