Caring is Sharing

These days, caring just doesn't get you as far as it used to. Grandma sometimes tells me this story about the old country, ostensibly for the purpose of making me feel like a total shit. It goes a little something like this (it's best if you imagine hearing it in Grandma's barely accented voice)...

"Back then, my father, he was a tinsmith. He had a shop on the main road in town, and every Sunday, the market would come into town, because back then, they didn't have any supermarkets, so people would travel from town to town selling things. And people would come to town, and they'd ask him where was a good place to set up their tables. And he'd say, 'You can sell right here, in front of my store, it's right on the main road.' And anybody who'd come along, he'd say, 'Set up right in front of my store.' So he got to know everybody.

One time, after the market closed, we all got together at our house for dinner, and while we were eating, we hear this loud crash outside. And everybody was like, 'Oooh! What was that? What was that?' So, he went outside and there was this woman, and she must of gone to the bar and she was a little, uh, drunk and she must of fell against the window. So my father, he brought her inside and he told her, 'You rest here, and then tomorrow you can leave.'

Now, when my grandmother died, they had to sell her house, so my mother had to go to town, and they didn't have money for a donkey, so she had to walk, and it was a couple hours walk. Now, along the road there were — como sei dici? — le brigande — the bandits. And while she was walking, one of the bandits, he stopped her and asked her who she was and where she was going. And it turned out that after the market closed, my father was in the bar and he bought a drink for this man. So he let her go. And he sent a signal to all the other bandits: don't bother this woman. And she went and came back, with all the money from selling the house, and nobody bothered her. All because of one drink."

Which all just shows Grandma's old-timey heartland Chicken-Soup-for-the-Soul naivete. Honestly, who the fuck does this nowadays? You buy someone a drink and suddenly it's an awkward invitation to get all personal and shit. I'm not the only one that's uncomfortable with this, but for some reason, Grandma seems to lay the entire burden for society's alienation with the individual on me.... I guess when you're old, things are different. If you're twenty-two years old, and you're male, and you bake cookies for your neighbors — well, that's just creepy. Do the same thing when you're post-post-menopausal, and it's not only innocuous. It's sweet.

Bitch.