Is it me?

Odder and odder, the old women of Liverpool talk to me like we've known each other for years. Since I've been here, they have been popping out from the bus shelters asking me to tie their shoe strings, saying sweetly, "Scuse me luff. Would ya fasten ma lace?" Or they turn to me in the scrum of the Tesco dairy aisle and say, "Activia 3 pound 50! In Prescot last week, they was 2 pound 90." And I do what you'd do. I tie shoes, and cluck at the Tesco people taking over the planet.

Recently, I was trudging through Blundellsands, just north of Liverpool, once a Victorian seaside retreat, where, now, as it turns out, a creepily beautiful sculpture by Anthony Gormley is. Composed of 100 cast iron men scattered down two kilometers of flashing silver coast, the men (casts of Mr. Gormley) stand hock-deep, waist-deep, and -alarmingly, if you don't know what they are- neck-deep in the surf gazing out as the last trickle of shipping in the Mersey estuary slides by and people walk their dogs and gaze out too.

Well. I was walking down toward the beach through a neighborhood notable, I would say, for its remarkably oppressive bungalow-garden-driveway endless-loop uniformity, like a bad cartoon. As I approached one driveway, there was a lady in a flowered dress standing by her garden wall while her husband placed the recycling bag (marked Recycling Bag) neatly beside the sidewalk to match the neighbors' yellow bag recyclng bags, and as I passed, she turned to me and said, "I was walking with groceries just down there, and the man ahead of me allowed his dog to foul the sidewalk." I paused, like anyone would, but kept moving, like anyone would, and said, "Well, really. Gosh. Some people. Really." which rather egged her on and she said, "Yes! That's right! Some people!" but she veered off topic with, "Are you're from Canada, then?" and I said, "I'm from the US." to which she replied, "I have a sister in Canada." She was having to yell now, " Helen in Ontario." "Oh," I yelled back. But then she called, "Are you on your way to see the iron men?" which made me stop. "The iron men?" I called. "Yes," she said, "Horrible things," which made me not only stop, but come back a little, and say, "Really? Why?" And she said, looking rather pleased I'd come back, "Well, they have their... things, you know...." which was sweet (sort of) in a up-tight, priggish, annoying, Puritanical sort of way, so I said, "Oh. They're anatomically correct, eh? Ha ha!" rather randily for me, and the spectre of 'things' was swinging around over our heads. And she said, "Yes. Horrible. The children hang things from them." and we both laughed, which was, not just sort of, but in fact, sweet. And so I said good-bye, and went to go look at them.

These aren't ancient, apple-bearing hooded crones, they're just women, seventy-ish. Not obviously insane, although maybe a little spittley and thick lensed. The thing I find odd and would like an explanation for, please, is that it's as if they've been waiting for me. They step out, or turn around, or straighten up and just continue our conversation about shoe-laces or yogurt or "things, you know...". Do they see me as one of their own? Just since I've arrived with all the various worries of leaving and arriving, I've acquired these new frownlines braided down through the soft puckery skin at the corners of my mouth. In a beauty, lips' corners turn up even when they're frowning, but in me, soup and beet juice is going to run down into these gullies some day I just know it, and someone will have to pat it dry. But who? They're there even when I'm smiling.

So it appears to be age, loneliness, or dementia we have in common. They can see it.

In contrast, the old men of Liverpool hate me. Jeez. Yesterday, B and I were walking up the exhaust pipe that is Mount Street, along Lime Street station past the homeless shelters and the Asylum Seeker advice centers that are housed in magnificent chocolate sandstone Georgian wrecks with No Loitering messages posted on the finely fluted columns, when coming down the hill, a little old toad of a man came barrelling at us all bow-legged in giant boots with crazy hair like frayed wire, and the fingers of his filthy gloves cut off, and his chin folded up like a second nose, and as we passed, he turned to me and stopped. And I stopped. And he looked at me, and blew what can only be called a raspberry. Jeez.