letters of the alphabet that don't belong in a civilized world

I was at the supermarket the other day waiting in the checkout line to purchase my weekly supply of microwavable foodstuffs…which is what passes for ‘cooking’ in my kitchen…when a guy with full cart and three kids got in place behind me.

The kids, all under the age of six, were in various states of what I could only guess was an extreme sugar rush. The youngest who was sitting in the cart’s child seat, was twisted around reaching for an open package of Oreos that was sitting just out of reach on top of the mountain of food in the cart.

Another was hanging from the man’s arm, singing, over and over again at the top of her lungs, the chorus from some Fergie song. And the oldest daughter kept pulling the Oreo cookies out of reach from her younger sister in the cart, telling her that they would ‘ruin your dinner’.

The man looked frazzled, and I was glad no bridge was anywhere in the vicinity…for he surely would jumped without hesitation.

I turned to him and, in the spirit of understanding and empathy, said, “I imagine you have quite a few bottles of aspirin at home.”

He wearily looked at me and said, “eff you.”

‘Eff you?’ I thought.

‘Eff me?’

I was speechless…and besides, it was my turn to proceed up to the cashier. But what would the correct response have been other than paying for your groceries and leaving?

The whole thing bothered me, so as I pulled out of the parking lot, I called my friend Gwen.

After relating the story, she asked, “he just looked at you and said ‘eff you’ - as in f*** you?”

“I can't imagine what other 'F' word he would have been referring to,” I told her.

“That’s strange…the guy is probably deranged or something. And to say this around his kids? You did the right thing by just leaving.”

‘Yes,’ I thought. I did do the right thing. I’m the bigger man here.

But it still bothered me. And an hour later I called Gwen again.

“Should a deranged guy like this really be caring for children?” I asked her. “I mean, to say ‘eff you’ to a stranger at a grocery store really displays some antisocial tendencies, doesn’t it? Isn’t there some type of law against this sort of thing?”

Gwen sighed and said, “Look…you’re obsessing too much about this. Truthfully, you shouldn’t have said anything at all to him. Just forget about it, alright? It’s over. It’s done. Move on.”

‘Easy for her to say,’ I thought. She wasn’t told to ‘eff you’ while innocently waiting to pay for her groceries at the supermarket. What was happening to society when complete strangers were telling each other to ‘eff you’? The complete fabric of society dictated that people didn’t just randomly go around saying ‘eff you’ to other people. The world was clearly going to hell in a handbasket.

I called Gwen later that day to lament about the state of the world that we were living in.

“WILL YOU JUST SHUT UP ABOUT THIS ALREADY,” she told me. “You should have just minded your own business. Bottles of aspirin? It wasn’t even that funny. GET OVER IT!”

She clearly didn’t understand the male-bonding properties that exist in a simple bottle of aspirin. And what did she mean by ‘not funny’? The aspirin bottle remark was very funny, I thought. Is it my fault that my wry, observational humor was over her head?

I mulled over the incident all evening. Alright, so maybe the bottles of aspirin comment wasn’t that funny, but it’s not like I had a whole lot of time to come up with something better. Still, being told to ‘eff you’ seemed very harsh. I was merely sympathizing with the guy. Shouldn’t my compassion have been a welcomed relief?

Later, as I lay awake in bed, I was still thinking about the whole ordeal. ‘I imagine you have quite a few bottles of aspirin,’ I had said…to which he responded, ‘eff you’.

And then, in the slow-motion instant replay that was being broadcast in my brain, I noticed something that I had missed before. Wait a minute, I thought, rewinding and replaying the incident frame by frame in my mind. It wasn’t ‘eff you’ that he said, but ‘a few’.

Did he have bottles of aspirin at home? Of course he did…a few. He wasn’t some antisocial psychopath after all.

I sat up in bed and immediately called Gwen to let her know that all was right in the world.

She groggily answered the phone and I told her what I had just discovered.

“You see? There was nothing for me to worry about. I just misunderstood what the guy had said. Hey, I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

She was quiet for a moment, as if pondering my revelation. Then, in a small and groggy voice, I heard her response from the other end of the line.

"Eff you."