I’d like to introduce you to a new resident of our home: Mr. Wally Face. He’s been living with us for about a month now, maybe longer…. ever since Bill got a hold of a piece of drifting sticky tack left over from what I had used to hold our Christmas advent candles in the windows.
At first, Mr. Wally Face was simply a blob of sticky tack on the bathroom wall, just above eye level. Spotting him first in my peripheral vision, I thought he was a large insect climbing up the wall, but the rising panic (what kind of bug that size would be around in February?) gave way to amusement, and I left the blob there.
Within a few days, the blob had morphed into something different. I think at first he was a smiley face, and then a few day later he was all shocked surprise: his mouth was an “0” and he had developed eyebrows (raised). After that, he was Very Very Angry, and then he was a cyclops. Later he was a kitty cat, replete with whiskers and pointy ears. And there was a stretch in there, for a few days, I think, during which Mr. Wally Face was an expression of shocked pain: he had the point of a safety pin sticking out of one eye.
Now he is an alien. He’s been an alien for over a week now.
The thing about living with Mr. Wally Face is that one Just Never Knows. He could remain an alien for Some Time To Come, or he could turn into a beaver, or a dog, or a blob of sticky tack. It’s good– and healthy, I think– to not grow too accustomed to things; to discover the new, the exciting, the different; to find, after over a month of bathroom residence or, say, sixteen years of marriage, that one can still be pleasantly surprised by the one you live with Every Day.
