Blogging Made Me Do It

Today, we drove to the airport to pick up our oldest (18 y/o) granddaughter. Along the way, we stopped at a traffic light in the little Canadian town across the border. There was a young guy, 18-ish, who caught my eye at the intersection because he was wearing an interesting black t-shirt with a raised-gold city-skyscraper drawing (maybe puff paint?), and then I saw that he was wearing those dopey, droopy black levis, but with beautiful gold-embroidered back pockets (somewhere in the vicinity of the other side of his kneecaps). As I was watching, he pulled out a cigarette pack, pulled open the thin cellophane strip at the top, and then dropped it onto the sidewalk. I gasped mentally. And then he took the rest of the cellophane package and threw that, too, on the sidewalk.

Because I had been writing about this kind of thuggish behavior only a day or so ago, I felt that I ought to do something, so I rolled down the window and yelled at him, “Hey, don’t throw your trash on the sidewalk!’ And as I did so, I realized his ears were all stoppered up with iPod earphones. So, I yelled it again, but louder; loud enough to penetrate the 15 feet and the earbuds that separated us.

He turned and looked at me, heard me, squinched his eyes up, gave me a disdainful look, and proceeded to walk across the street as the light changed, absolutely indifferent to my views. And we drove away. So there it was. Action following words. Talking the talk and (sort of) walking the walk, or at least talking the walk. Like anyone who has ever taught elementary school kids, I have the general feeling that I’m entitled to correct young kids in public should the need arise. But I have never, in all my years, corrected a perfect stranger of even vaguely mature years in a public setting.

This is what went on in my mind in that brief moment: it seemed to me that if I was going to write on this blog about how much I dislike that kind of behavior, about how uncivil it is, then I ought to be willing to back it up with actual words spoken to actual people upon need, even if they were, gasp!, not little kids. So, the blog made me do it. I don’t know whether the blog is thus making me a better, more consistent person or just a crankier person, but if it’s the latter? Well, in one’s eighth decade, one is entitled to choose curmudgeonliness--at least now and then.