Five space aliens showed up on my front lawn this very morning. You might think that is too routine a thing to mention, but as they took note of me looking out of my bay window, they bowed and smiled, perhaps to reassure me that they were not of the dystopian sort that I often came across and had to have hauled away. The considerate behavior of these five was a welcome change of pace. They slowly inched nearer, as if taking pains not to startle me. At first I thought they wanted to check me out. But no, it was the window, naturally, because it was made of stained glass depicting impressionistic scenes of mountains and streams. Could it be that they didn’t have windows where they came from?
One of them looked at me as if asking for permission, and started touching the glass, tentatively at first, and then more firmly. I thought I had better go outside and supervise; I did not want broken glass and spurts of fear on their part.
I did not know which planet they were from, much less their language, but they must have hailed from a serene secure society, since they took my presence for granted rather than as a source of concern. I gently motioned for them to stand back from the window and showed them how to just touch and not push on the panes. I then thought how nice it would be to take them inside, so they could see all of my objects and paintings and architectural detail, but they all rushed over to the window to look at the courtyard they had just left, preferring to look out of a window as well as to peer into one.
That seemed to satisfy them, and they each danced a little jig in front of me—a form of thanks?– and they hopped back outside, and they left the premises altogether, and presumably the town, and the planet. What was that all about? Perhaps they had come for the mystery of the boundary between inside and outside. Ha! More likely, they had decided to cross our planet off their list as not containing what they were looking for
*****
For my microblogging, see me at https://twitter.com/chaplainkkaplan
offbeatcompassion 