The Giant

I told Cappy about the Giant. He's seen it, so now he believes, too. The Giant always shows up in movie theaters, church, ballgames,concerts...wherever I am when I'm out to enjoy myself. Cappy always wants to be early when we are going somewhere to get a good seat, and the only reason I bother anymore is to benefit him. We can pick the most choice seats in the whole place, but as soon as I start enjoying what we came to see, the Giant comes in, late every time, and sits down directly in front of me and suddenly I'm in the dark,staring at the middle of his back. It's gotten to be a game now, with Cappy and me. We wonder, 'well...maybe the Giant won't show up this time; it would be like winning the lottery', but just as we get really interested in the event,the Giant is here blocking my entire view. I nudge Cappy, he looks over, nods his head with me and whispers, "...the Giant", and goes back to watching his show.
To amuse himself and aggravate me further, the Giant has begun taking different forms, but I still recognize him by his dirty trick. One time he was a girl with huge black poofs of hair arranged like Mickey Mouse's ears. I'd lean way over to the right to see around her, and she'd lean her head to the right, in front of me. I'd lean to the left to see what was going on, and she'd lean to the left. Just to prove to myself that it was the Giant, I started to slowly lean to the right way over, and dang if her head didn't move slowly to the right, staying right in front of me, too, so to trip her up, I quickly leaned to the left, but he/she beat me there. Not funny. Not FUNNY.
Recently, we went to a movie and as usual, Cappy picked out two great seats for us, but this time we sat in back of a couple of petite ladies, thinking, "Aha, we have him now". I sat there smirking at our ingenious plan, sipping my soda, 'chonking' on my illicitly delicious hot buttered popcorn, and alternately popping pieces of chocolate into the mixture. Heaven. I had barely noticed a mother and her small children coming up the stairs in the aisle, because, for once, I was enjoying what was occurring on the screen. I didn't even mind when she moved her troop into our row. I did wonder why our row, what with all the other open spaces to sit. She sat a two-year old next to me, but I still didn't 'get it'; he was quiet enough, and aha...AHA! he was not between the screen and me. He sat there munching the snacks his momma dispersed among them, and I sat there watching the movie, thoroughly enjoying each tender morsal of my treats. I began to notice I wasn't relishing the taste so much. I broke my attention away from the movie to reevaluate my surroundings....oh noooo. Apparently the two year old next to me wasn't completely potty-trained. He sat there with an angelic look on his face, staring transfixed on the movie, but still grunting into his diapers or trousers...whatever. I leaned over and whispered to Cappy, "Can't you smell that??" He kept watching the movie and mumbled, "No...not really". I tried to ignore it for a couple more minutes, then gagging, grabbed my stuff and moved over to the seat on the other side of Cappy, whispering on the way by, "It's the Giant...he's over there pooing his pants next to me." Luckily, there were a few empty seats still far over so we moved there and watched the last few minutes of our show.
The next time we saw the Giant was at a high-school football game, where we went to watch Cappy's nephew, Ren play. It was still the same huge guy, surrounded by his group of short folks. It didnt' matter that I sat up on the next bench above him, after he came in late, he still towered way over me. Again, Cappy just looked and nodded in agreement with me, "The Giant"...no big deal now. At least he didn't stink this time.
That brings us to our much longed-for trip to Atlanta's High Art Museum. We did have a wonderful time. We forged ahead in heavy early morning traffic to get there when the doors opened; and we did. We got to see the drawings, paintings, sketches and sculptures we looked forward to seeing. We were impressed and thrilled at seeing history in front of us; not two feet in front of our faces. The works of Rembrandt, Poisson, Raphael; the palace artist's of Louis XIV, XV and XVI. This, the Portrait of Baldessare Castiglione by Raphael, was breathtaking. It looked as though if you could get close enough to blow the fur wrap, you'd see it ruffle. Humungous guards where there to make sure that didn't happen. Being an artist, myself, I love looking at the strokes of the brush or pencil that the masters made to create their pieces of work. To make the visit more wonderful, the museum had headsets for us visitors to wear, attached to small computers we wore around our necks, so that when we got to a painting, or whatever, we could punch in the number shown on the wall next to the artwork, and get an audio description of the artist, his place in history, and a whole bunch of very interesting facts, which brought the piece to life. I felt like a kid in a candy shop, and Cappy, who loves history, did as well. We moved over to a corner to begin our tour. We scanned the surface of each rendering while listening to the explaination in our headsets. (We clicked them on at the same time, so we could hear the same thing at the same time.) We were so engrossed, studying the works, we really didn't notice the jostling around us. I began having trouble hearing what was being said in my headset. I put my hands up and pressed them tighter to my ears, but it still wasn't working. What the heck? I could hear all kinds of racket in the suddenly large crowd around us. As I was about to turn around, a loud,wiggly, winding, caterpillar, consisting of what appeared to be inner-city school kids, all wearing bright red sweatshirts, brushed into us, between us and the works of art, where they parked, so their teacher could explain to them what they were looking at. We made our way around the room, but by then there were 'caterpillars' everywhere. More rambuncuous red ones, boistrous blue ones, taller terrible turquoise ones. And loud...they were loud. Cappy and I finally found one room, which seemed a little more quiet, so we got close to a large painting of a begger boy, and began discussing his feet. Cappy had great insight. He said that the artist had used a model, whose feet were used to wearing shoes, hence his toes were all scrunched together tightly. He said that, had the boy, in fact, been shoeless his whole life, or for a long time, the toes would be more splayed and relaxed. He made a good point. We were studying it more closely, when a line of those noisy students wiggled tightly in, right in front us again. One young man was hollaring that he was bored, stomped his foot and yelled, "BORED!" Other kids were whining about one thing or another. I knew then, that it was useless to try to concentrate on any one composition, so I turned to Cappy and we both nodded and mouthed at the same time, "The Giant", that miserable beast. We should have known going in that morning, when Cappy read a sign that said, "Toddler Thursday", that it was 'him'.