Nosey Me

I am nosey. I ask personal questions about people I have just met. My excuse for my curiosity is that I am a trained journalist and can’t help trying to find “the story” behind everyone I meet.

People and why they act the way they do is endlessly fascinating. Nothing is more true than, “Never judge a person until you have walked in his shoes.” On the shelf in my closet are five unpublished novels. All have characters who are involved with others whom they don’t understand at all. Unfortunately, no publisher finds them as interesting as I do.

People grow up with a set of ideas implanted by their parents. I live in a retirement home. Some of the sweetest old people still accept their parents’ prejudices without question. Living in different places and traveling to foreign countries made me aware of the differences between people – and how it is all right to be different.

My parents were a gentle people. My mother and father never raised their voices, not to me and my brothers, not to anyone. They tried never to do anything to upset other people. Before Mother went to Scotland on a tour paid for by my brother, she bought a book listing Scottish bed and breakfast houses. I told her, “Mother, you don’t need this book. Don has arranged for all the places you will stay. You haven’t opened the book. Take it back to the bookstore.”

Mother said, “Oh, no. I don’t take things back.” She was an old woman living on Social Security. Paying for that book meant skimping on her purchases at the grocery store. But she “believed” the store would be angry with her if she asked them to take back merchandise. Mother did not want to offend anyone.

Some prejudices are harmless – like Mother’s belief that she was “doing the right thing” by not returning things she would never use. Other “beliefs” can be just plain wrong, and, if carried to extreme, can lead to tragedy.

My father thought anyone who did not “believe in the Bible” was wicked. Only belief in Jesus kept people from lying, cheating, stealing, even raping. During the Depression, night after night at the dinner table, I listened to him say, in that soft Southern voice, that all our economic troubles were caused by the Jews. At the end of World War II we were horrified by pictures of bodies piled up by the thousands in Nazi Concentration Camps. I wonder if even then he realized what his prejudice could lead to.

Fortunately, people can learn. I grew up thinking all black people were lovable but inferior, incapable of doing things white people can do. Now I have friends that are black. Certainly they are lovable. Also, they are intelligent, accomplished, and my equal in every way.