There’s an old woman pulling weeds from her flawless flower bed. Damp dirt clumps around her pink, pansy gardening gloves. She’s wearing a faded sweatshirt with “World’s Best Grandmother” splayed across the front, as if telling all the other senior citizens that she trumps their grandparental affections. It doesn't matter that her grandkids haven't seen her for 10 years, or that she bought the sweatshirt herself down at the local pharmacy. I’m sure if you were to go into her closet you’d find twenty other sweatshirts almost identical to this one. They make her claim in the world. It is all she has left.
There’s an old man out on the side of the busy interstate that runs past his beat up trailer park. He’s alone, sitting on his parked John Deer lawn mower, watching the traffic blaze by him hour after hour. His hair is greasy. His old white tee shirt is sweat-stained. His tattered blue jeans are the same ones he's worn and slept in for the past two weeks. And In his weak wrinkled hand he clutches a cold beer, blankly zoning out as the world passes him by.
What happened to these two individuals? These two humans? How did they change from a thinking, pulsing, feeling mortal soul into a senseless, inconsequential block of meat held back from spilling onto the ground by only a thin, paper-skin shell? Their mind, once sharp and inquisitive, is now dull and dead. They have replaced their humanity with flowers and beer. When did they resign from the world? At some point in their lives, they crossed the threshold from the world of struggle and identity, into a world that is soft and easy. A world without a care. A world of denial. A world of complete resignation from everything that makes a man a human being. How does this happen? And why?
