Grocery Types (take 3)

Got your running shoes on? If the type that finds no good in the aisles and is critical of every gift his or her god gave them is off-putting, there is another from whom you should run before asking questions. This person, male or female, has a hook that runs sharp and deep and needs major provisions in an almost continuous way.

      "Can you help me find the canned tomatoes?" 

 "I think they're over there."

      "Could you show me." 

 "You bet."

      "Are they any good. I don't know. The picture on the can shows pale tomatoes."

 "Well, lemme see if I can find the better ones."

      "They look expensive." 

 Yes. That's too late to begin running. These people are -- in a broad sense -- healthy, if healthy means knowing how to get out of the World what they want or need and have never received. Indeed, the impression they give you is that you have what they need at this very moment. Trouble is? You don't ... they're insatiable ... Oh ... and your needs don't count.

      "Oh! And where's that good fresh pasta? Could you find that for me, too? I'd really appreciate     it." 

 Laura Nyro had a lyric: "Run, run, run, like a son-of-a-gun." I'm being callous, aren't I? Well, yes. These people have never experienced emotional satisfaction. Maybe their parents were profoundly depriving .,, but chances are pretty good that it wasn't the tomatoes that were held back; once the tomato problem is resolved, what to serve with them is near at hand.

 By the time you become a denizen of the Fourth Quarter, you might hope that you'd figure out what the Good Life was all about ... what the healthy individual looks like ... how the well community behaves. Some time ago, I thought it was sufficient for the healthy person to be one who appreciates and even cherishes the inner world of another. For that person, I imagined and wrote about it quite a bit, every two person relationship includes that cherishing of the Other's Others and Wishes and Beliefs. Unfortunately, that kind of person is easy prey for the tomato and pasta bandit who by now has you answering questions, mopping floors, and bending down to suck the dirt from between their toes. In their insatiable hunger, by the way, these folk do, indeed, feel they deserve what it is that they're asking for ... but will never be filled or satisfied.

"Run, run, run, like a son-of-a-gun."