The Mirrors on our Walls

The Mirrors on our Walls ©

By

Michael Casey

Well its the Wednesday before Christmas and like everybody else we are double checking when our dustbins will be collected over the holidays. I’ve not even finished my Kenco smooth coffee, yes I know you are all laughing the idea of anything smooth and me, ok, so I was listening to Justin Timberlake’s Mirrors and as I listened a pair of old ladies zoomed past on the pavement, or sidewalk in American.

The old ladies must have been in their 70s, their arms were linked and they had long walk coats on with coloured woollen bonnets on their heads, all protected from this first day of winter as the Google graphic tells us. I got up from my chair to watch them, instantly I knew I had today’s story, and that’s how fast the ideas come. I’m still listening to Timberlake Blue Ocean Floor is the track now, when I heard it for the first time a couple of days ago it made me cry, following the Mirrors track. Ok, I’ll admit it, I’m a big softie, I may look like a retired WWW wrestler but I have feelings.

So we all have mirrors on our walls and mirrors in our life, and they do say if you break a mirror it’s 7years bad luck, so what mirrors in your life, people and places and children pulling faces. When my wife came to live with me I had an enormous mirror placed on the bedroom wall opposite the then empty wardrobe. So to me that mirror represents getting married and having my home invaded by Shanghai girls, first my wife then our first followed by our 2^nd daughter, and finally by a female bilingual cat called Totoro.

A mirror allows you to comb your hair before you leave the house, Dan Dan the desperate man, washed his face in the frying pan, combed his hair with the leg of the chair, is the rhythm I can half remember, you can google it for fun. The point being a mirror allows you to tidy yourself before the rest of the world sees you. Puddles used to serve that purpose but if you were in a dry spell then puddleless led to untidiness, but the invention of mirrors sorted all that.

As for lives, they have mirrors and cracked mirrors, a life is much more complicated than a reflection. The old ladies reminded me of the two old sisters who ran the bakery near our house when I was a child, one was married to a short man who wore a white lab coat all the time, and best of all they also ran a sweet shop too. We called it “OffYouGoes” as she always used to say Off You Go back home to your mum. The sisters were inseparable, only death split them apart. Many years later, maybe 40, the surviving little sister was buying bread at the bread shop near my house. I told the shopkeeper later what a high compliment she had received having this baker use her shop.

I used to see a couple of identically dressed twin sisters on my bus coming home work, forever together, it was near impossible to tell them apart. One day and thereafter, after many years of this sight only one was to be seen. I was afraid to ask what had happened for fear of opening up a wound, or a scar to the heart. They looked like legal secretaries to me, I have worked at a Law Firm in my travels, but I’d never know now. And now I’m at home a hausfrau, so I’d never meet them or one of them again.

Brothers match brothers, they go to the same school, and I don’t mean Eton, they go to the same grammar school in my case, or Casey case if you like.Do you or should you match each other? Major, Minor, Minimus as you are called by Mr Hanney the Latin and Spanish teacher, as he sizes you up from his 5feet zero height, made taller by his Operatic tones and steel heels. You are different from your brothers. And so I was, much heavier and tank like on the rugby field, but with a flair for French as Mr Notzing our French teacher used to say, 20 word test every week for 4 years. Either your were a dullard or you breached 80% because of him and him alone.

You must never try and copy anybody else, you are not a reflection you are yourself and nobody else. My daughter has a friend who copies her all the time, they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, but Single White Female is just creepy. So looking directly into camera, Stop IT, I stole that line from Donald, not Trump, O Mac Donald he has a farm just outside Birmingham, you can google it if you don’t believe me. Where I live there was a chicken farm 100 years ago.

Some people assume my daughters are the same, their posh English accents do sound the same to me and my wife and we cannot tell them apart a lot of the time, so God help the rest of you. I believe in the Sinatra way, clear enunciation, then everybody can understand. Don’t pressurise your kids with you brother does this or your sister does this. They are not stuck in a mirror with no way out, that’s Dr Who or a Fairy Tale. Let kids decide for themselves, obvious hide the Stella Artois, just in case the little bastards, sorry little angels, find it, and use it to wash their hair with, that really would ruin your Christmas.

A mirror is a thing of beauty, and not because you are looking at yourself naked flexing your muscles, then you put on your Victoria Secret lingerie. Ok, stop will all the men wearing women’s lingerie put it back in the knickers drawer, its your wife’s Christmas present, its not yours. Your Christmas lingerie is the Marks and Spencer lingerie in the drawer below. I added this paragraph for all the transvestite readers as I like to end with a smile.

To finish as I do have to visit Aldi, as I do every day, remember always look in the mirror when you change, but the greatest change is not what you see in the mirror but what you do in your life. Sadly Michael Jackson sung the song but never followed his own advice. So from this Michael, have a mirror in your life, its the advice you give yourself, or you’ll be like the Emperor and his New Clothes, no matter how often you look in the mirror you’ll always be naked.