Backseat - From Where I Sit

March 2006

By: Michelle

Life is Too Short for Sliced Peanut Butter

Sliced peanut butter. Yes. It’s true. Some enterprising company has come up with a way to make our lives more convenient by pre-slicing and pre-packaging peanut butter. Personally, I have never felt it a major challenge to put knife to bread. Evidently there must have been some catastrophic peanut butter slathering incident that prompted the need for it or maybe there was a lawsuit from the peanut butter spreading impaired. Regardless, it appears the invention is now taking up residence in our grocery store shelves. At the risk of sounding like an alarmist, I just have to say that this is just another small symptom of a much larger and more ominous problem. It all starts with sliced peanut butter to save a few seconds of time and who knows where it will end?

I reached this profound conclusion, not in the usual place of enlightenment, on the back seat of a motorcycle, but rather in the most unlikely of places – behind the wheel of my car. It was the end of a long day. The commuter train was delayed on the way home so I had to rush home in time to feed my son and drive him to his Tae Kwon Do lesson. After managing to successfully complete this mission, I was picking him up to take him home for the evening. I was finally able to relax enough to take a deep breath while I was waiting for traffic to clear before I could attempt to make a left-hand turn.

My few seconds of peace were shattered by the sound of a loud “BEEP” from the car behind me. My first instinct was to pull out. Luckily, I took a second to look before I pulled forward and noticed that the traffic was still too heavy for me to turn onto the road. I thought to myself that the car must have been beeping at somebody else. I loosened my grip on the wheel and continued to wait for the traffic to clear when I hear another unmistakable “BEEP”. I again check the traffic. There is no way I can safely turn into it. Beginning to wonder who is so impatient that they feel the need to risk my life, I look in the rear view mirror and see this young woman of possibly 20 years old in some sporty little import impatiently smacking her gum and glaring at me. She leaned forward onto her horn “BEEEEP”. There was no mistaking that she had urgent business and my unwillingness to hasten my death was causing her great distress.

In order to prevent any of those nasty road rage incidents you hear about, I fought off the urge to get out of the car and disconnect her horn. Instead I opted to do things the genteel southern way, the slow way, the “you can’t rush me even if you wanted to” way. My mind immediately turned to my elderly former grandfather-in-law, Granddaddy, the epitome of southern gentility. He would sit for hours rocking in his chair on the front porch recounting story after story from the days when everyone knew everyone. Us “younger folk” were often impatient with his ramblings and sometimes walked out while he was in mid-sentence only to return minutes or sometimes hours later. This never seemed to bother him. He would just pick up where he left off while gently shaking his head at the impatience of youth.

As I sat there while this little Harpy (whose mom probably is the inventor of sliced peanut butter) was trying to increase my insurance premiums by forcing me to drive straight into oncoming traffic, I decided that Granddaddy had it right. I began to wonder why we feel that we must save minutes and sometimes only mere seconds of time, only to fill them with more tasks. Suddenly, I missed sitting on the porch watching Granddaddy slowly rocking in his chair and shaking his head at all the “fussin’ and rushin’ of folks”.

Cell phones, computers, iPpods and Blackberries were never part of his world. He would never understand the need for sliced peanut butter. I begin to smile as I begin to recount memories of a simpler time. By now the traffic has cleared several times over and the honking has become a frenzied symphony behind me. Yet, I am unmoved as I start telling my son, who is now growing more embarrassed by the minute, that he should value the simple things in life and how I remember when everything was much happier and less rushed. He starts looking at me in that long-suffering special way that children do when they try to calculate exactly how many more trips they will have to endure with you before they can drive themselves.

As our eyes met, I found that I had to overcome the sudden urge to find a rocking chair and a front porch. Yet, I felt the need to enlighten my unappreciative son further, lest he grow into the ungrateful, maniacal speed demon in the car behind me. “Yes” I continued, “Faster isn’t better. We have faster speech, faster foods, faster communications and what does it get us? Fussin’ and rushin’ – nothing else.”

About that time, the impatient hot-head behind me decides to show me her ability to multi-task as she blew past me with one hand solidly on the horn and another displayed prominently in a “one-fingered salute”. I just smile and give a friendly wave back, shaking my head at the impatience of youth as my son slinks down in his seat. He decided to change the subject – “Mom, did you hear they are going to start making sliced peanut butter? Isn’t that awesome?”

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