Opinion : Human Descrepancies

There’s one thing you can rely on. You can be certain of it even when everything else is questionable. People are unpredictable! That you can be sure of! Count on it! They don’t fit into proper categories like a straight line of grocery items typed up and printed off of your handy dandy desktop. They jump from stereo-type to stereo-type, basically out of line is what they are.

Like my writer friend who pens detective mysteries. People die, blood is spilled. These are not pretty scenes. So go on. Tell me what you’ve summed up about her. It’s easy to guess what she reads. That’s a given. Right? You’d think. But not even her fictional P.I.s would guess this. She reads sappy romance novels! Yeah! I found this out the hard way. Let’s just say I’m not into Nora Roberts and leave it at that.

A family member is a fitness trainer, a mighty good one too. There’s always a write-up in the newspaper about someone she’s saved and transformed through therapy. Her classes at the gym are the first to fill up. She’s well educated and teaches on a variety of health related issues. She’s also a force to be reckoned with at the dinner table. If you’re the cook you’ll likely feel a bit uncomfortable hearing about the importance of purchasing locally raised, grass fed meat free of hormones and harmful chemicals. And the comments about not eating all day to save up for your meal followed by the news that a few extra miles will be put in thanks to your fare is not quite flattery either. It would be so easy to check off the boxes on this girl. We could write out her grocery list because we know what her menu looks like; egg whites, arugula, ocean fresh salmon. It’s so obvious. Write carob on there. If she’s human she’ll be wanting chocolate like the rest of us.

I endured years of my husband’s fretting over my improper offerings to his health conscious relative while I refused to be bothered. My thought was, I can cook and I’ll give you the best of my world. When you’re up to inviting us over we’ll sample your tofu and pumpkin seeds. The invite never arrived but we did get a call. The fitness guru was seriously ill. Early symptoms appeared to be an erosion of the esophagus due to a steady diet of Coke, chips and McDonalds food.

My homemade pumpkin pie, roasted turkey and garden green beans were reproached in light of this lifestyle? This was beneath my own standard of living and I didn’t have seven years of college and twelve years of fitness instruction to prop up my behavior.

Now my father simply eats what’s on special. He won’t buy bananas unless they’re in stock at the discount produce store for $.19 a lb. A penny more and he’ll go home without them. All while I’m across town unaware, setting my own bunch on the scanner for $.59 a lb. With him, it’s not about hunger and entirely about cost. Everything is in fact. He refuses to hand over two quarters for a video game to his grandson who spends the evening alone with him for the first time. It’s a waste of money. He gets perturbed at the amount of gas wasted when my mother drives the grandkids to the mall 2.3 miles away from their home. “What do you think you are a millionaire?” He’ll ask her as she pulls out to make use of the free play area in front of Sears. This is the man who saved the panels from an old coke machine to fashion a shady overhang on his lawn mower, who tried to secure his television wires to the broad side of his house by using a sawed off grab bar to act as a conduit, and who finds $25 for a load of mulch an extravagance beyond his willingness to pay.

Concerning that mulch, he could make his own, free, which is what he settled on. He was more than willing, in truth, he was anxious to purchase a mulch machine for $654 that he planned to feed the fallen limbs gathered from his .25 acres of property whereupon grows one tree and four rose bushes. I estimated that should strong winds prevail over the next 26 years, enough of his neighbors’ branches may land in his yard making it possible to create mulch to surround two of the four rose bushes and at 109 years of age he will have recovered the cost of purchasing the mulch outright.

And do you realize he has a snowblower? And a power washer? This guy who squabbled over my mom’s purchase of a new toilet brush. And then rescued the disposed toilet brush! Trust me when I say it got far more use than his collection of machines which waste too much gas to justify his using them. But not his buying them. Somehow this sneaks beneath the radar of his frugal eye.

I console myself with these discrepancies that all humans seem to tuck away somewhere as I’m visiting a local whole foods store for the first time and am made aware of my bright colored clothing and my large plastic bracelet leaching BPA into the sacred atmosphere. Everyone is uniformed in muted shades of organic cotton and hemp. All female adornment is slight, delicate, of the earth. But I’ve been to church; I recognize total conformity and derision in a glance for those yet unconverted. I’ve survived with my soul and brain intact so these amateurs cannot bruise my conscience. I may appear blasphemous proceeding to the checkout minus my own earth friendly bag with a materialistic quantity of food that would never fit into one unfriendly bag, but I sure am appreciative of the basil and lavender scents permeating the air.

I borrow the cashier’s pen and taped to the top is a plastic spoon! A plastic, non biodegradable, mean to the earth utensil! Is it a subtle message presented as non-violently as possible? Was I in effect just handed the equivalent of a knife to put myself out of my misery and rid the earth of one more human leaving too large a footprint? Though I’m past conforming for cheap and temporary impressions, I did learn to return kindness for insult in church, so when she asks me if I want my milk in a bag I refrain from saying yes.