It’s The Thursday Thumb-Twiddler:
1. One hot summer afternoon, while walking through a parking lot at a large shopping mall, you notice a dog suffering badly from the heat inside a locked car. What would you do?
When I ran across this question, it resonated with me in the context of this story, so I wanted to include it.
At a mall, I’d try to contact security, either to see if they could find the owner, or else if they could open the car at least to get some air in.
If there was no way for that to happen, and I really felt the dog was in imminent danger … I’d like to think I’d break the damned window.
2. You are in a restaurant rest room. You notice an employee leaving without washing his/her hands. Do you bring the matter to the attention of the owner or manager? If so, do you do it publicly or privately?
I would probably not say anything (and would probably try to rationalize not doing so), but Margie probably (rightly) would, though privately.
3. What is one item you own that you really should throw away … but probably never will?
I have all the correspondance I’ve ever had with anyone in various boxes. That includes past romantic (and marital) involvements. I keep them not out of any sense of romance, mind you, nor even of nostalgia per se, but from a sense of History. On the off chance that I should become famous, for example (not that I can think of anything I should be famous for), it’s material that biographers would want access to. Or maybe my grandkids, or theirs, would find it of interest.
Or maybe I’m just a pack rat.
Or maybe my memory is so bad that, if I throw out stuff like that, it’s like throwing out concrete reminders of who I was. Heck, I wouldn’t go back and edit stuff out this blog, would I, if something were to happen to dramatically change any of the relationships I talk about here?
I don’t read those letters. I don’t talk about them, and I really don’t even think about them. But I would be loathe to throw them out.
An interesting note: My mother kept all the correspondence she ever recieved (which in a era when phone calls were expensive, was quite a bit). My father kept them after she died, but put hem away and forgot about them. he gave them to me a few years ago, and I sorted them into date order (by the postmarks and dates) and read them. Although, they didn’t contain a word by her, it was interesting to have a niew of her world through the eyes of others. Since they cover most of her abult life, it was a neat thing to have. Although I never save things sent to me, I’d be loathe to throw these letters away.
Interesting. Thanks for that perspective.