Sometimes I wonder if I have changed much over the past, say, fifty years. Beyond the obvious, I mean. Sure, I’ve learned a lot and had as many personally defining experiences as I’ve had heartbeats. I just wonder if I am essentially the same person I was as a child, a teenager; a 20-30-40 something.
Do we really change over time or do our personalities simply undergo the same sort of superficial aging that our bodies do?
I’m always looking at total strangers and trying to imagine them as children. Transients for example, the people we used to call “bums.” When you see a dirty man in tattered clothing drinking from a paper bag or pushing a shopping cart do you ever wonder what series of misfortunes took him where he seems to be? I say seems to be because none of us can fairly judge the lives of others but still, it seems clear that this downtrodden man is not the current visage of a once happy, fresh-faced child. Surely somebody once loved him. Maybe somebody still does.
What happened?
The other day I was in line at the supermarket and the woman in front of me was taking forever getting through the process. The checker had finished totaling the woman’s modest basket of products but now the customer was digging slowly through the contents of her purse looking for coupons. She found plenty but apparently not the ones she needed. As we all waited patiently the checker sent the bag-boy off to find the manager who then began to search through his office for the correct coupons. Meanwhile, the lady in front of me seemed oblivious to the growing line of increasingly irritated people behind her.
I was fine. I was in no hurry and found it kind of funny. I had a small wager going within myself that once the coupon crisis was solved, then and only then, the woman would begin looking for her checkbook and spend another five minutes writing the check, entering it into her records and deducting it from her balance. She might even pull out a handheld computer.
The oblivious are truly oblivious.
Meanwhile, the man behind me was commenting on the procedure.
“Can we get this thing going?”
“Jesus Christ, is everybody on strike here?”
“What the hell’s taking so long?”
He crabbed a new sentence approximately every thirty seconds. None of us responded but the checker looked at me and slyly rolled her eyes. I smiled. The oblivious woman saw and heard nothing.
At some point in all of this I began to wonder why this man in his sixties or seventies was so grouchy. Sure, he had only two items and had been waiting, as I had, for an inordinately long time to get through the checkout but it was a pleasant day. I couldn’t imagine that he needed to get somewhere with a bag of potatoes within the next five or ten minutes. Probably he was just going home to park himself in front of the TV and crab at his wife while she fixed his dinner.
How’d he get like that? And if I, a perfect stranger, thought he was being an ass what must his own family and friends, assuming he has any, think of him? What lovely part of his happy, gentle nature am I not seeing? Did he even have another side to him?
Not that it’s any of my business, of course. But, keeping my thoughts to myself I worked the process through to a logical conclusion.
What nice things would people find to say about this man at his funeral? They’d probably say things like, “He was strong in his convictions,” and, “He never backed down.”
I could be completely wrong, of course. I may well have just seen an unflattering moment in the life of the most wonderful husband, father and grandfather who ever walked the earth. But it did remind me that the way we treat others has eternal consequences. We make ripples.
I want to be remembered smiling, tolerant, patient, wise and goofy. I should start working on that memory right now.
Oh, and I was right about the checkbook.
The supermarket slice of life is one we’ve all encountered, but it does give one pause thinking about having our behavior recorded by a writer as you just did. And – this is how you’re gonna remember that guy. Oops.
First of all, I am more often that crabby guy behind you than either you or the oblivious woman. I’m assuming this woman to be a sweet, white-haired octagenarian as the oblivious in supermarkets always seem to be, but your story didn’t indicate. But I am neither the patient one, nor, because of that, the oblivious because I am constantly aware of how the slightest of my actions can put people further behind their self-imposed schedules. I often grab my groceries/book/coffee/lunch and race off without even putting my change/credit card/receipt in my pocket for not wanting to further the line by even a mere seconds. Sad? Sure. Paranoid? Maybe, but that guy won’t be complaining when I’m in front of him.
That said, the race against time that we all seem to have nowadays is truly pathetic and I often try to force myself to slow down. But your snippet of these peoples’ lives enforce one further salient thought: live life as if you were on a reality show.
Think about it. We’ve all seen the reality shows where people are competing for some obnoxious amount of money or the opportunity to be the next in line to whomever is important this week, but one thing I noticed is that when watching these shows, there is always at least one person you hate. These people are boligerant and appear to exist for no reason other than to be thorns. You want them off the shows, but they are never eliminated immediately so you just hate them longer. And you keep watching hoping they’ll be voted off soon, but at the same time wanting them to stick around because you just love to hate them. It’s a cyclical concept and these hellions usually are eventually eliminated. Now follow the logic. Reality television is not live. It’s filmed months in advance and edited for our enjoyment to easily slip into an hour timeslot allowing the requisite breaks for me to go to the bathroom and get another cookie. It’s EDITED.
So back to the guy you hate. It raises the question, why are these terrible hate-filled people on the show for so long every time? Well, maybe they really aren’t terrible hate-filled people. Go with me for a second. Maybe the editors pick someone who’s had enough bad moments caught on camera and who progressed far enough in the game to make things interesting if his moments are properly edited and allowed to air. For a show that has 15 contestants, one of whom leaves every week, we only see a grand total of maybe three minutes of each person, give or take some seconds. You see my point? When I say, “Live your life as if you were on a reality show,” I mean simply to go through your days such that if filmed and edited to five or ten minutes people would think, “I like him.”
Sorry to ramble, but it’s just one of those things I think about while I’m cleaning lights at work.
And now you will too.
There was a man found dead in an abandoned Detroit warehouse. He was “encased in ice, except his legs, which are sticking out like Popsicle sticks”. His body was that way for about a month, until someone called the authorities. The reason I am writing this is because I look at people and wonder what lead them down the path, and where are their loved ones? I find it interesting what the article said about his brother’s reaction to hearing the news, that his brother was dead for about a month. The article said:
“Homer Redding, 59, was heart-broken but not shocked by his little brother’s death.
According to him, Johnnie was a soft-hearted man who fell into a hard world and could never extricate himself from it, no matter how hard he tried. Johnnie was infected with the need for drugs and alcohol. Rundown buildings were his clubhouse.
“He chose the life for whatever reason,” Redding said. “But he wasn’t homeless. Please don’t call him homeless. He always had a place to go. He was loved.”
Too bad “the way we were” didn’t turn out to be “the way it was.”