Sunday, April 29, 2012

me, a role model? whose idea was this?

Slowly, ever so slowly I have started to litter.  Just small annoying things like plastic covers on restaurant toothpicks and Hershey kiss foil wrappers, things the big guy likes to leave in my car.  And yet I am the owner of two recycle bins and I do compost for the city and I am the daughter of a woman who screamed hell and fury at my son when he threw a banana skin out the car window as we crossed a Colorado mountain. "Relax, Grandma," he said, "it's biodegradable and there's a raccoon somewhere who's going to be really happy." 

And that's what it's all about, in this fragile ecosystem we trample on, we need to keep the raccoons happy.  But as I said, me littering, I need to readopt my former good habits and this thought crossed my mind when I saw the four-year-old toss a half-eaten cheeseburger and McDonald's diet Coke glass out the back car window. Problem solved, Grandma, can I have a wipe?

We are acutely aware we are role models again when the grand babies start to line up, a wonderful but sobering sight. And we blame the mean kids on the school playground for teaching our innocents those bad, bad words but in reality they heard it from us sitting in the back seats of our cars as we try to avoid being cut off by the idiots and dickheads out on the road. And I let them know very loudly my opinion regarding their lack of driving expertise.  When my father was my passenger I honked and gave the finger to a cigarette-smoking woman on a cell phone as she slid into my lane just inches from my front bumper. Oh, it was a swift and fair reaction and I cursed above the squealing of my brakes. Sonny shaking his head said, "you're lucky no one has shot you yet."

When my oldest grandson was three he was watching me change the diaper of his less-than-a-year-old brother and we beheld something orangey-green and pastey in the bottom of the Pampers. "Jesus Christ, Adam, what the hell did you eat?" was my response.  I got one of "those calls" from my daughter later that evening when young Ethan repeated Grandma's elation during another diaper change.

"Water wings are for pussies," I tell my granddaughter, forgetting that she is basically a tape recorder of all adult conversation she is privy to. Maybe this one will slip by and the phone will remain silent.  Well, they are for pussies, anybody of good sense would agree with me.