Honey Vinegar

My mother had a saying she used to say to me a lot. “Shut up and eat your beans!” Well, yes. That was one of them. My grandmother used to say to me, “Yeat! Yeat! Don’t be stingy. You be stringbeans. Jonny, Eat!” OK. I won’t tell you what she said about me in the summer when I tanned really dark… That I was, “Black like Ni…” It was a less enlightened age.

So, my mother, lazy Susan of sainthood and insanity that she was, said, “You can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.” That was at one of her more lucid moments.

Sigh. Every story has to have a sigh. That one moment when you, the collective audience and me, the collective writer, comes together and just shares a joint sigh. Good, bad, evil, sublime. We all understand. It’s just, sigh.

I knew what she meant, of course. That the bourgeois rule of kleptomania had to be brought down from within the machine… No. She meant nothing of the sort. She simply meant, don’t be a jerk.

I ask very few questions of people. First, I ask them to explain what they mean and please use small words so I can understand. And then I attempt to understand what they say to me the way they understand it. Not that I have to agree. Not that I have to approve. Just understand. Even if it leaves a coppery taste in my mouth and I feel dirty by having been exposed to it. I never agreed or approved. Just listened. Just. Understood.

And then I ask my next question. How are we different than that person, the one whose opinions I exposed myself to and feel dirtied by, but still tried to understand? How about my sins? What about whataboutism? Honey and vinegar? Are those my only options? Yes. I know. I can catch flies with honey. I can repel them with vinegar. What if I can’t turn myself into honey? Or vinegar? What if I am me, a honey-vinegar dressing on the philosophy of life? A little sweet. A little sanguine. A little sour. And always a little tart.

What now?