Hoot and a Boot

In which our Hero and the Church Lady get along like an Owl and a mouse with an uzi

When I was younger, my mom brought home a present somebody had sent for me, a little plush owl. Except I was a young *boy* and owls are cool birds but not all that exciting, and so the owl was largely abandoned and eventually found a home on my father’s dresser, in the guest room that also served as his wardrobe/storage space. And for the most part it was completely ignored, except when I was up to no good and sneaking into my dad’s “room.” Whereupon I discovered that the stuffed owl had unimaginable powers. Well power. Its little glass eyes were always looking at you. You could move left, move right, duck, jump, whatever, the thing just looked. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t do anything. Just… stared, as owls are wont to do.

Second creepiest thing I can remember from my childhood. I *HATED* that owl. I hated that it stared at me. I hated that it wouldn’t blink. I hated that it seemed so alive and still.

And now, I’m a grown man, sitting and standing to the rituals of the mass, and once in a while as I look towards the musicians little area as they sing, that damned owl is back, reincarnated as an old lady sitting a few aisles over. She’s looking my way, she sometimes smiles, and I want to yell, in church, across the tens if not hundreds of people and despite the parish priest mid harangue, I want to yell. “WHAT!?!!?!”

I hate her. Not personally, just… she bugs me. Maybe she has a friend who sits near me, I don’t know. But I sit where I sit because it makes my mother happy, and that puts me in the firing line.

I hate her.

She wears hats to church. She’s one of the very few in that congregation that does. Sometimes they’re very ordinary hats. Sometimes they’re big hats. One of them is this massive floppy construction that she’s folded or flopped into a half-cape down her back and a scalloped projection to front, making her seem either inhuman or else like one of those absurdly designed “looks-cool-but-seems-painfully-dysfunctional” police helmets from any number of science fiction movies, usually the faceless oppressors of the dystopian society that Will Smith’s biceps will cow into submission with their beauty and the murmur of the magic words, “Oh hell no.”

I feel oppressed when she looks over. I feel dystopiated, with no sign of Will Smith’s biceps, when she’s smiling my way.

Maybe she’s just happy. Maybe she’s a great person. Maybe I remind her of someone in her life, and she’s not smiling at me. Maybe there’s that friend I mentioned earlier. But the extent of my christian charity is to not scowl as I fail to make eye-contact. Meanwhile she stirs my paranoia.

The new church refurb aggravates the problem. Now people are looking across the center aisle to catch the projected lyrics to the awful songs. And she’s on *that* side, directed to my side anyway, and so now the feeling of gazual harassment is just aggravated.

With my luck, the answer is likely to be that she’s got no visual threshold at all and is just looking at a different part of the blur, or she’s hallucinating and everywhere she looks is jesus-y but I can’t answer for her experience, only mine. Only my seething rage and wounded privacy, and it was as I tried to think of some way to quantify or at least qualify my discomfort, suddenly I remembered the owl.

She’s the goddamned stuffed owl. Staring, unrelenting, unblinking, unwanted, dead-eyed stuffed owl.

On an unrelated note, I may need therapy. (Or a rifle.)