Obligations

Sometimes I wonder what things people say because they think they’re supposed to, when really they don’t even know what they’re talking about.

Around this part of the country, it seems that a lot of people (mainly old folks) talk about the weather like it’s a serious subject. And, when it rains, inevitably someone says, “Boy it’s good it’s raining. We really needed it.” It doest seem to matter if it’s been raining cats and dogs for the last seventeen days, we sure needed this rain. It doesn’t matter if the crops are drowning because the ground is saturated. We needed that rain.

I wonder if the people who say that are in frequent contact with farmers who know how much rain we should be getting, or if it’s just something they say because they think it sounds right.

Or like when someone says, “how precious. What a good little girl” when I’m at the store with my baby. How do they know if she’s good or not? Maybe she spent the last fifteen minutes in the car screaming and now she happens to be happy because I opened a box of cookies and gave her one (sometimes that is the case, although she really is a pretty good baby).

Or recently I ran into a lady from church out in public at a restaurant. We were chatting (and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t have given me the time o’day if I hadn’t been with a friend whom she knew) about church things, and she asked me if I still coordinate child care for the Bible studies. I was surprised she remembered, andsaid I do. Then she says, “Boy that’s such a blessing to us.” And she said it to a couple of other people too. But she’s in her late fifties probably and all of her kids certainly aren’t needing child care (because they’re older than I am). It’s just kind of funny because I wondered if she’d personally been blessed by what I was doing or if she was just saying it because it sounded like the right thing to say.

Even if it’s true, I don’t think that it was a personal experience for her. Don’t get me wrong: I’m not really picking on this particular woman. It was nice of her to remember what I do. But the whole standard of saying things that sound right just because they sound right just bothers me lately. Sometimes, I think, you end up sounding a lot more intelligent and polite if you just keep your mouth shut when you don’t know something.