You're like my wife in that respect. She notices things like that while I tend to bumble through life looking at an overall picture and missing the finer points.
It is really interesting to hear her tell a story because she caught so much more than I did. Where I may have known more of what was going on in the whole she knows more ..... detail.
There's advantages and disadvantages to looking at things as a big picture not noticing the details, or looking at things in detail missing the big picture.
It's six of one thing, half a dozen of another thing, and so it evens out.
I'm thinking of a high school class reunion some years ago, around the turn of the century, where I had a long conversation with a long-ago classmate, a girl who from about four years of age until she was a teenager, had to wear heavy metal braces on her legs. It wasn't polio--this was some years too late for polio--but something else.
As a girl, she always wanted to wear long dresses, to cover up the braces.
Long dresses for girls were NOT fashionable at the time.
Her parents would not let her wear long dresses; she had to wear dresses about the same length as those of her sisters and peers, which were about knee-high, exposing the heavy metal braces.
She was (is) a decent and civilized person, but confessed during our conversation that this had caused her some, uh, inner personal problems, this deformity being so blatant.
If she had been my daughter, if she wanted to wear long dresses even if out of style, she could have worn long dresses. She was after all up against something with which the rest of us never had to deal, and possessed natural instincts to "guide" her on the best means of dealing with the problem. And she wasn't bad-looking or anything; she would've stood out in a crowd with a long dress, but not in any negative sense.
The only thing I could figure out about the attitude of her parents is that they were two of the town's few Democrats, and being Democrats, they were naturally insensitive to the needs of others.
Me, from about the age of four years until twelve, I preferred the "page-boy" sort of haircut (but about half an inch, an inch, longer), so as to disguise the absent ears. I assure you the "page-boy" haircut was NOT in style at the time, but for me, it served its purpose.
Rather than enduring a kid hollering at his mother, "Hey, mom, look at that boy with no ears!", I had to endure only an occasional kid hollering at his mother, "Hey, mom, look at that boy who looks like a girl!"
Life rarely offers a choice between something "good" and something "bad;" more usually, the choice is between something "bad" and something "worse," and so one makes out the best one can.
(After about twelve years of age, I started wearing my hair, still long, pretty much the way the house-losing cymbals-clanging primitive, the "Symbolman" primitive, wears his, which is more socially-acceptable.)
