There are two groceries I frequent. One of them is clean and pleasant and has quick and friendly customer service and relatively short lines and donates to charities with which I am involved, like Special Olympics and the MDA. It also has higher prices. The other one is pretty run down and has very long lines, but the prices are better, so I go there for many things. But you know how it goes, each store has things the other one doesn't carry, and I like the produce and the meat better at one but the milk better at the other. I go to both of them every week in order to get everything on my list.
I wondered for a while last year if I wasn't going to have to stop going to the store with the cheaper prices, because whenever I went there, I saw my stalker. Having a stalker in itself was a little surprising, and very, very creepy. The first time I saw him I was totally unnerved, and I was at the very back of the store where he had followed me, and as I went in and out of aisles I saw him peek his head around them. A few times I would go very quickly down the ends and race into a random aisle in the hopes of throwing him off, (which didn't work) and at the end I headed straight for the back again and nearly ran down a narrow aisle in the middle of the store and straight into a check-out lane. Darned if I didn't see him sticking his head up from another lane looking for me, so I ducked down and stayed that way, and practically ran to my car and locked all the doors behind me. I was seriously frightened, and wondered if it was safe to ever go back.
I did see him again, in the same store, on a couple of future occasions, but I was ready with cell phone in had to call 911 if he approached me. He never did, but I would sometimes see him looking. About this time, we befriended an employee of this store, and I confessed that I thought I was going to have to abandon that grocery. He asked what the stalker looked like, and when I told him he laughed and told me that my stalker was a plain-clothes security man, watching for shop lifters. I was shocked and a little insulted, but we soon figured out why he had pegged me as a likely suspect.
You see, I'm very organized about some things. As all my friends and family know, I live on lists. I make lists for everything, and as the holidays approach I even make a list of the lists I'll need to make. This lifestyle happens to extend to grocery shopping. Naturally, I keep a running grocery list like most people, but I have a two-column list with things I get at the cheaper store on the left and things I get at the nicer store on the right. When I write something on the list I put it in the appropriate column, and my family has learned to ask what side to write something on. Then when I get ready to go to a store, I recopy in the list on another piece of paper in aisle order. So when I enter a store, I am ready to go exactly to where I need to in order to get things in the quickest and most thorough way possible.
Well, I guess the poor security department had never seen anything quite like me. I'd go in the store, pick up a cart, and proceed briskly to the very back of the store and make my way quickly to the front, methodically plucking things off the shelves as I went. They assumed that this was the behavior of a shoplifter, because surely nobody else would be that quick and prepared. Once I had this straightened out with our new friend, I never had another problem, and never again saw my "stalker".
I just returned from that store not half an hour ago, and I had a wonderful time tonight. There was a charming young man at the door acting as greeter, and I asked him where to find the twine. He looked a little puzzled, so I changed it to "string" and light dawned.
"First," he said, "you go right down this aisle to the bink"
"The bink?" I repeated, startled.
"Yes, the bink! You know, where the money is?"
"Oh, the bank!"
"Yes, the bink! That is what I say! Then you turn up the mine aisle,"(I decided against asking) "and go to where the lawn begs and garden things are."
We struggled on for a minute, both laughing hysterically at our attempts at communication. He finally said "You got that?" I agreed that I got that, and he punched me companionably in the arm and exclaimed "You rock, seestaire!"
I never did find the twine, although I did recognize the MAIN aisle when I got there, but I grinned and chuckled the whole time, even through the dreaded check-out line. Life is good, when you can have that much fun at a grocery store.
Love, Spud.
Sunday, September 21, 2008
Thursday, September 4, 2008
Clowns of God
Little Trig Palin has caused a cascade of thoughts in my head, and it's not clear where they'll end--so let's just take a peek in my gray cells and see what's cooking. A stream-of-consciousness blogging! First off, no matter where Sarah Palin ends up going (or not going) politically, she will always have my personal approval for deciding to give live birth to her Down's Syndrome son--as if my personal approval mattered! It's a brave and proper thing to take what you're given and see what good you can make of it, and an even braver and more proper thing to willingly--with advance notice-- take on the challenge of a child who will, in many ways, never really grow up.
Is it possible that our sons (Mrs. Palin's and my own) are part of a vanishing society? I read that most Down's babies are now aborted, and that there will be fewer and fewer of them in the years to come. Of course, there were no signs before birth that there was anything amiss with Kevin, and I suspect there will always be a goodly number of children whose problems become evident only over time. Pete Singer would have us kill them off too, as a mercy to society if not to his own clueless self.
I once read that in Italy the mentally handicapped are referred to as the clowns of God. That name fits! There's no one cheerier of all my acquaintance than my son, who more often than not wakes up in the morning and bursts into song, or looks outside and exclaims "What a beautiful day!". It's beyond my comprehension that someone else might have decided that his happy life was not worth living. I remember when I was pregnant with our second (and perfectly normal, as it turns out) baby, discussing the value of pre-natal testing for birth defects. I said that it didn't matter, we'd take what we were given. The relief on my doctor's face was palpable. He's had an enormous soft spot in my heart ever since.
That being said, I have seen the other side. I worked in a large state-supported teaching hospital for several years, and for a short time I found myself working on the unit where, among other things, women came to have their pregnancies terminated. That was a difficult assignment. But I learned something very valuable there, because up until that point I naively and probably arrogantly assumed that all abortions were because the mother just didn't want her baby. That was wrong. Most of the pregnancies were being terminated for entirely reasonable reasons--the baby lacked lungs, or lacked a brain, or--in the case of a nurse I knew personally--because the baby was so terribly deformed that he had no functioning systems in his body. None of these children had any chance at all of surviving outside of the womb, and in many cases the baby had already perished, and it was a great mercy to deliver the baby early. I'll never forget witnessing the silent grief of a mother holding her child who had died in the womb--tiny and perfect, but not ever capable of drawing its first breath.
I still just want to have a gigantic tantrum and throw things at a world where these things happen. Pregnancy is supposed to be one of the most joyous times in the life of a family, but sometimes it just isn't. It's such an in-your-face piece of evidence that we live in a broken world full of broken hearts, and makes me long for heaven all the more. I am furious that miscarriages and other fetal deaths happen, and sad beyond measure. And I also get furious that there are women who for whatever reason decide that they don't want their babies, and extinguish them instead of giving them to any one of the hundreds of families who long for babies and can't have their own. I learned early on at the hospital to avoid reading that line of the chart--I didn't want to know which mothers were grieving and which ones were relieved that their inconvenience was gone. It was not my place, and my heart couldn't take the dreadful knowledge. I decided to give each woman the benefit of the doubt, knowing that her life was open before God, and didn't have to be open before mine. Fortunately, I didn't have to stay on that unit long before I was able to move to a different one.
So where have I ended up? With a heart newly broken, because I haven't relived that experience for some time. And with a great appreciation, no matter how I end up voting, for Sarah Palin. Bless you, my dear. God bless Trig, and grant him a happy life. And God bless any family who looks upon a baby with medical or physical problems and says "I'll keep it" and gives it a life of love and care. Your reward shall be great.
Love, Spud.
Is it possible that our sons (Mrs. Palin's and my own) are part of a vanishing society? I read that most Down's babies are now aborted, and that there will be fewer and fewer of them in the years to come. Of course, there were no signs before birth that there was anything amiss with Kevin, and I suspect there will always be a goodly number of children whose problems become evident only over time. Pete Singer would have us kill them off too, as a mercy to society if not to his own clueless self.
I once read that in Italy the mentally handicapped are referred to as the clowns of God. That name fits! There's no one cheerier of all my acquaintance than my son, who more often than not wakes up in the morning and bursts into song, or looks outside and exclaims "What a beautiful day!". It's beyond my comprehension that someone else might have decided that his happy life was not worth living. I remember when I was pregnant with our second (and perfectly normal, as it turns out) baby, discussing the value of pre-natal testing for birth defects. I said that it didn't matter, we'd take what we were given. The relief on my doctor's face was palpable. He's had an enormous soft spot in my heart ever since.
That being said, I have seen the other side. I worked in a large state-supported teaching hospital for several years, and for a short time I found myself working on the unit where, among other things, women came to have their pregnancies terminated. That was a difficult assignment. But I learned something very valuable there, because up until that point I naively and probably arrogantly assumed that all abortions were because the mother just didn't want her baby. That was wrong. Most of the pregnancies were being terminated for entirely reasonable reasons--the baby lacked lungs, or lacked a brain, or--in the case of a nurse I knew personally--because the baby was so terribly deformed that he had no functioning systems in his body. None of these children had any chance at all of surviving outside of the womb, and in many cases the baby had already perished, and it was a great mercy to deliver the baby early. I'll never forget witnessing the silent grief of a mother holding her child who had died in the womb--tiny and perfect, but not ever capable of drawing its first breath.
I still just want to have a gigantic tantrum and throw things at a world where these things happen. Pregnancy is supposed to be one of the most joyous times in the life of a family, but sometimes it just isn't. It's such an in-your-face piece of evidence that we live in a broken world full of broken hearts, and makes me long for heaven all the more. I am furious that miscarriages and other fetal deaths happen, and sad beyond measure. And I also get furious that there are women who for whatever reason decide that they don't want their babies, and extinguish them instead of giving them to any one of the hundreds of families who long for babies and can't have their own. I learned early on at the hospital to avoid reading that line of the chart--I didn't want to know which mothers were grieving and which ones were relieved that their inconvenience was gone. It was not my place, and my heart couldn't take the dreadful knowledge. I decided to give each woman the benefit of the doubt, knowing that her life was open before God, and didn't have to be open before mine. Fortunately, I didn't have to stay on that unit long before I was able to move to a different one.
So where have I ended up? With a heart newly broken, because I haven't relived that experience for some time. And with a great appreciation, no matter how I end up voting, for Sarah Palin. Bless you, my dear. God bless Trig, and grant him a happy life. And God bless any family who looks upon a baby with medical or physical problems and says "I'll keep it" and gives it a life of love and care. Your reward shall be great.
Love, Spud.
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