Hate

I ran into an Ice Queen I once knew,
back in my first years at a school
I shall refer to ambiguously as attended by me.
She was walking her dog down the main drag of my new neighborhood.
And the interchange went something like this:

	"Ice Queen," I call out en passant, but using her real 
name.

	oh she says barely turning without punctuation or 
capitalization hi

	"How are you," I continue sagely in the time-honored 
tradition of friendly banality.

	fine

	"Nice to see you," I lie in happy conclusion.

	bye she walks on

Perhaps I have offended you some lines ago, reader, with the 
cognomen Ice Queen.

Allow me to prove myself worthy of your judgement.
I do not mean this as a class-action insult in any way.
Not at all. I mean it quite personally.

Ice Queen, as I shall continue to call her to protect the innocent 
& guilty alike, was the most hostile person I had ever met.

Ice Queen, having been out of school ten years, had perhaps 
higher emotional stakes on the line in that school game 
than I.

I succeeded where Ice Queen failed for whatever reason & 
certainly not for lack of intelligence.

More of an attitude question really and who am I to blame her, 
except the unwitting representative of everything she 
hated, male & straight, and/or perhaps wanted to be, on 
the fast track & young. 

And/Or perhaps she thought I harbored some notion of putting 
moves on her, and who knows, back then I was capable 
of all sorts of absurd romantic attachments.  After all, 
she was not unattractive in that distant, at times 
desirable ice-queeny way.

But I assure you, I never engaged in any behavior in the 
remotest way resembling even the most innocent of the 
borderline yellow-light examples given recently by the 
Navy in its sexual harassment guidelines.

All I really wanted to do was not even baby be friends with her, just 
effect a modest temperature change for the good of all
humanity.

Now it is quite likely I will be seeing that icy stare again in the 
cold white liberal not-in-my-backyard corridors of my 
own backyard.

If she ever takes those shades off.

Sure hope it stays 

sunny.