Grapes of Wrath

My mother would eat grapes in the grocery store before she bought them. There, I said it. It is all out in the open – a family secret. Mother would have her Gucci purse in the front of the basket along with green stamps and any other cost saving idea she could use. Her excuse for the grapes was always, “I want to make sure they are good”. While that particular trait of hers would irk me to no end as a child, another trait would find its way into my own adult personality.

I am blunt. I wish I had the Irish ability to tell someone to go to hell in such a nice way that they actually look forward to the trip. I just tell them to go to hell. If I don’t like someone, I tell them. Life is too short to waste your time on trying to make mean people think you care for them when all they do is cause you pain. I come by that honestly.

I grew up in a small town in Mississippi where social time occurred at church or in the local Kroger. When I was about ten my mother and I were on our usual trip to the Kroger when we ran into someone she knew in the produce section. The biggest news in town that month was the fact that a couple of well off empty nesters had adopted two young sisters from Africa after their parents had died. The empty nesters had met the girls on a mission trip with the church, and were trying to get them acclimated to their new surroundings before they started school. The random woman in the produce section asked my mother if she had heard what was going on and made the comment that “We didn’t need any more of THOSE people in our community”. She was of course saying that we didn’t need anymore dark skinned people in our slightly affluent section of town. My mother, with a mouth full of grapes, replied, “We don’t need bigots either.”

Mother doesn’t take any shit. She takes even less as she had aged. I do not take any shit either. The issue occurs between us as we refuse to take each others shit.

An acquaintance approached me in the supercenter not to long ago and asked me why on earth we allowed people from the near by homeless shelter to volunteer in our museums occasionally. While he does not donate a dime to the museum, he felt we were crazy to allow such meager people to help us with certain tasks. I explained to him that the museum staff and I feel it is our Christian responsibility to help people back on their feet in their time of need. I also added that if he wanted to be a cold hearted bastard about it that was his problem.


I really do try to sprinkle the love of Jesus to those around me, but sometimes I get a little off track on my delivery.

I thought of my mother at that moment. One reason was because of what I had just said. Another was that I looked down and took a good hard look at my basket. It was full of Sam’s Choice items and coupons were spilling out of my Kate Spade purse.

I was not, however, eating my grapes.