She worked in a grocery store. And her name was Carolina. It was a grocery store that had changed names many times as the once rural area on the outskirts of Austin became a suburb and began its transition into serving a more urban and less homespun clientele. It had been a Safeway, a Tom Thumb, an Appleby’s, and now it was a Randall’s.

Carolina worked the deli counter. Had for years. She was a country girl. The 7 am to 3pm shift as I recall. She was a hold-over from the times of yore when the store had provided full-time jobs with benefits instead of employing legions of minimum wage part-timers. And from beneath her cotton-flossed over-teased and over-bleached excuse for hair; her painted and glazed porcelain thick-make-up baby-doll face greeted us all.

Not that in the rural south any less was to be expected, or to be considered remarkable I suppose, save for the transition of the neighborhood around the grocery store from what I euphamisize (euthanize) as rural to urban instead of what it was in reality which was from white trash redneck country to urban yuppie.

So there stands Carolina, 40 ish and single, a sore rural thumb like a Dolly Parton parody at a skinhead convention and I walk up and ask for a pound of sliced ham for sandwiches because its on sale. And Carolina smiles her porcelain prettiest and gets a ham out of the deli counter to slice. Now the ham she pulls out is the one I want, but it’s a new ham, and wrapped in plastic. After she gets it up on the counter, Carolina starts peeling the plastic off so she can slice it. It does not go well. The plastic is thick, cryovac plastic and sort of “vacuum sucked” to the ham. Apologetically, Carolina turns to me because it’s taking her so long to peel off the cryovac without breaking a fingernail and says in her best southern drawl “ I’m sorry sir, this is worse than skinning a squirrel”.

We laughed. And eventually I got the ham. And I guess we bonded of sorts, her telling me she was from Kentucky and some other things. So she began to say hello to me whenever I was in the store. Over time though, the hello’s sort of increased. They became more flirtatious and they increased in the distance at which she would greet me until it became almost embarrassing. At times, like some painted jack-in the box clown, she literally jumped up and down waving at me and yelling “hello sir, good morning” across a couple of aisles from behind the deli counter. Anyway, I mused over her squirrel comment and what I guess had become her sort of “misplaced-ness” in both time and space. On some level, I found her desperate, even tragic.

There came, eventually, an unfortunate time when my wife witnessed one of these jubilant greetings. And, after that, another incident in which I was receiving one of these distant loud greetings with a full porcelain smile and a batting of the Tammy Fay eyes that I swear caused a small breeze when my wife rounded the corner behind me. Carolina choked off in mid-greeting and shifted to a much more somber “and hello to you to ma’am”.

Now what I am about to say next is cruel, but Carolina became a joke between us. My wife even christened her “the squirrel girl”. But although it’s cruel, I mention it for another reason, for buried in this tragic and seemingly pointless tale of the desperate Carolina is something else.

That something else is the notion that as sapients, we project and perceive. The process is however indirect. We project our reality onto some sort of mirror for others to perceive but their perception is not direct, more as if they see something else, the back of the mirror perhaps. At this point, the parable of the cave of course comes to mind but is to be dismissed. It is to be dismissed because it only addresses the form of Carolina you see, the shadow of the teased hair. It cannot explain how she projected what was perceived as tragic. In this case, the square would cast a round shadow on the cave wall.

So in the end, one day Carolina bubbles up telling me she’s engaged and showing me this big engagement ring. She’s marrying a rancher and moving to Dallas. And she does.

Now you have followed me this far and if you understood why Carolina was tragic as I explained, we must address a crucial question regarding ourselves and our sanity now. If Carolina’s dream fulfilled becomes reality you see, what do we make of the construction of her as tragic? She was tragic, or at least perceived as tragic although perhaps she never was. I doubt she would think so. So what of this tragic construct that I led you to believe, that made such sense to you, to us?. Was it wrong? Have you been reading the ravings of a madman? I explained her as tragic and you understood. You know you did. The ravings of a madman? You understood the ravings of a madman? You maybe don’t like me now, do you? We were friends, friends before, before, when we were laughing together at the tragic Carolina. The ravings of a madman? I haven’t changed. I just ripped the veneer back and exposed us both. Are you trying to back away – back away from me whom you followed here – is your mind searching back through the story for something you disagreed with even as you read here the ravings of a madman. Something to cling to, to claim you didn’t follow. And its unfair of me to reach out ahead into you like this and I’m maybe pissing you off now stirring up praxis like a stick in a mud puddle. And “he’s breaking the rules” you think - like mugging the camera - stepping out of bounds. But you came here, you followed. You laughed with me at her hair, at her make-up, at her tragedy and desperation. And you nodded with the madman that yes indeed the square would cast a round shadow on the wall of the cave. And now she’s on a ranch in Dallas and we’re here in this ugly twisted hellish mental space with no way out. No way out. You and me. Staring at the mirror like A Picture of Dorian Gray and seeing nothing but our ugly selves. Its what we get. What we get for judging others, you see. For judging Carolina.