Decayed teeth / Decayed ambitions

After some phone calls you stay sitting where you are, recounting it as it seeps in and changes the character of your mood and outlook. I knew that, with the way this one ended, it certainly would, though this time I decided to walk with it. So for the second time in the afternoon, the boy and I packed up for a long trudge through the neighbourhood with some Bazan in my ears. A few blocks from where I keep my belongings I came across a woman who immediately expressed her excitement at the sidewalk construction being done along the street adjacent to where we stood. We were at the corner of an old church built with stones the size of chairs. She had her hair cut in a bob and wore glasses with dark red frames. She reminded me of an old boss I had, a slightly maniacal woman who lacked the characteristic to see with varying perspectives. This woman told me that this kind of work was just fantastic to be happening, and that usually you have to get into the faces of city politicians in order to get anything done, and that she was someone who regularly does just that. I congratulated her on the difficult work that kind of activity presents, and I told her and encouraged that it is important, that grassroots political movements are sometimes much more effective and immediate for a community in need of results. She said that she was a Big Sister as well, to four girls, and that one of the elder sisters had found an exciting direction for herself by also becoming an activist, and that it seemed she was even starting to dress like this woman here. As she was telling me that, a girl with hair dyed bright purple walked past us, and behind her the woman raised her eyebrows, looked at me, and pulled her chin back into her neck. A friend of hers, she said next, told her that she should start running for a position here, but that she did not want to do that kind of work. She told me that if you want to make politicians do their job you have to get in their face, and if her meaning was not made then she stepped forward while she was talking, telling how to get under peoples' skin while almost rubbing noses with me. Her teeth were like the colour of mustard, the real kind of mustard, and one of her front teeth had a dark crack that travelled diagonally across it. This woman told me that the city has a policy of filling holes within 48 hours of being reported, but that the time it took to fill the one that broke her back took five and a half years. "You have very nice eyes, and nice teeth," she said with some kind of knowledge. "That will get you very far." Maybe it did.