The shoemaker and the elves

Remember the story about the shoemaker and the elves? Shame on you if you don't, go ask any 6 year old.

You don't have to look too closely to notice all the things that happen in the cover of the night while you sleep. The anonymous early morning set of emails concerning local news, half price shoes, flat screen televisions and a new fortune should you provide the number of your bank account, that you sleepily check and delete. All those leaves you crushed on your way home have assembled themselves neatly into a hill on the grass and there's no crackle in your step on your way out this morning. You find a line of sparkling white toilets with raised seats, quite unlike the careworn washroom you grumbled about yesterday.

Ever wonder how the bulletin boards get plastered the way they do even though you never see a mob of people having a stapler fight to punch their piece on that precious space. I wish I could tell you that you can catch them red handed in the half lit corridors outside the library late in the evening. But I was there last night, with my posters and my stapler, and there was no one there to fight. So I just tried to be considerate, under no force, and posted my little ads only over events that were over. I roamed the corridors, merrily stapling and solitary. And then I was spotted, by a man with a vacuum cleaner, piling chairs on desks lifted off the carpet. I met his glance and kept moving without a nod. When I step onto the deeper blue fiber in class today, I will know the face behind the cause of the clean carpets. And the carpet cleaner will have solved the mystery of the sign sprouting bulletin boards.