Total strangers keep congratulating me on the birth of SteelyKid. No, not people on the Internet, people in real life.
We have a standard dog-walking route that we take Emmy on every night, and Kate and I usually do the evening walk together. Of course, Kate’s not coming along on those now, and now people along the route keep saying “Hey, did your wife have the baby? Congratulations!”
In a sense, they’re not really strangers– after all, I know where they live. But I really don’t know anything meaningful about them, and tend to identify them sort of like Curious George characters– The Woman With Two Big Dogs, The Man With the Yappy Poodle, and so on.
The funny thing about this is that it really never occurred to me that the identification would go both ways. I mean, I think of them as The Guy Who’s Replacing His Siding, or The People With the Really Old Golden Retreiver, because that’s how we see them every night, but it never really dawned on me that they were simultaneously noting us down as The Really Big Guy and the Pregnant Woman.
It’s kind of nice, in a weird way, though. It’s the sort of thing that city dwellers refer to as a “small town atmosphere”–it’s not, really, because they don’t know a tenth as much about us as people in a real small town would. It’s one of the features that make me really love our neighborhood.
It’ll be cool when Kate and SteelyKid are up to coming along on the longer walks. We might even introduce ourselves at that point, or maybe that would ruin the effect…
We have a number of similar interactions in my neighborhood. Last year I was The Guy Who’s Replacing His Siding; this year I’m The Guy Who’s Having His Roof Redone. And there are several people I know similarly: Old Lady Walking Her Dog, The People Who Rent Out The House Across The Street From The House They Live In, etc. And in some cases there are houses I think of along similar lines: the Purple Palace, the Gingerbread House, the New House (it was built in 2001; the next newest house in the neighborhood was built circa 1976), etc.
Having walked various dogs every day for the last twenty years I am well acquainted with this syndrom. The real problem is when you meet the same people without their dogs; i.e. their defining characteristic! You half recognise them but for the life of you can’t remember from where you know them.
The Next Step:
Once Steelykid starts attending school, then strangers will come up to you and say, “Hey, aren’t you Steelykid’s Mom/Steelykid’s Dad?”
Sure I know my kids’ friends’ parents . . . if I could only remember their NAMES. 😉
Why transitive? Do you mean symmetric instead?
I must agree with Michael Norrish.
“A relation R on a set S is transitive provided that for all x, y and z in S such that xRy and yRz, we also have xRz.”
Weisstein, Eric W. “Transitive.” From MathWorld–A Wolfram Web Resource.
Transitive comes up when you discover that a friend of a friend is not necessarily a friend. This happens when you invite a bunch of folks over for a big party, and some of them just perversely refuse to like each other, even though you like all of them and they all like you.
And let’s no even start on disproving “An enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That’s what I might re-name “the GWOT Fallacy.”