Canvassing

I was walking hurriedly to the bank yesterday half an hour before closing time, when I was stopped by a volunteer in pink doing fund-raising. After waving me down, she started off by saying something like, “Mother’s Day is coming!” and since she was holding a pink carnation, I walked away quickly. I don’t quite know what to think about Mother’s Day yet. But as I hurried away I heard her voice trailing behind me, “These flowers are made by elderly dementia patients!”

After running my errand with the bank (which involved them granting me good service/ doing me a favour which I felt strangely moved by), I was walking out of the mall when I saw the volunteer and her partner in a distance. I started to feel a little bad and this time, when the other lady in pink waved me down (without making reference to Mother’s Day), I stopped and asked something brusque and stupid like, “Are you guys selling flowers?”

She laughed and started by thanking me for asking, after which she proceeded to tell me more about her cause. While she was chatting with me, her partner — the one who first stopped me — came by and said, “Thank you for coming back.” In a semi-chummy way she tried to have a friendly conversation with me, which only makes me ever more self-conscious and painfully awkward. She said she liked my hair colour, she said it’s been a hot long day, she said at some point that she’s been a full-time volunteer with the organisation for a few years now, and for some reason she said also that she has a two-year-old kid and a shotgun marriage. 

By which time I resorted to all the learnt niceties I had in repository: that’s alright; you look really pretty; so long as you’re happy; it’s good you have your mother’s help; raising a child is not easy; all the best to you; you’ve been wonderful.

I really do admire her; I’m a little baffled by her honesty to a complete stranger, but I relate too to the need to be so nakedly honest to someone you don’t actually know. She really is pretty, but that doesn’t matter beyond the fact that her prettiness radiates from what is within her.