"Okay, so you want three boxes of fair-trade, organic wheat puffs? Desi, how many for you? Four? So that leaves five in the second case. Any takers? Eloise? Two? So that's three left. Okay, we'll take the leftover three from the second case as well as the entire first case. On to page two: Soy Products. Who's out of Soy Nice? Case for everyone?
In an effort to reconnect with the Gentle People, and to try and shake off eight years of feeling like a high-tension wire wrapped around the neck of a psychotic wolverine on speed, I joined the local Organic Food Buying Group. Perhaps brown-sugar, no-palm-oil, conscientiously-harvested-soy-nut granola can undo the knots I've tied myself into. I pored over the recycled paper Catalog and underlined my choices and set off on my groovy adventure.
And so I entered the home of my meat-is-murder pals I and H, lovely, decent people who believe they can change the world through yoga and fibre nuggets. Perhaps they can. I hope so. The place was swarming with well-behaved, intelligent, emotionally focussed children produced by the "attached parenting" school of, well, parenting, and the parents responsible for them. All the grown-ups looked peaceful in their hemp apparel and their ponytails. I would have said "zoned" if I had been going into the whole experience with my customary jadedness, but for once I wasn't. So "peaceful" it is.
Enter me. Enter Smoochie. Not exactly the poster family for Emotional Focus. We'd be more your spokesfamily for the "Sassy Brat" stain-resistant (read: EARTH DESTROYING) clothing line. Which brings me to:
Page Four.
Diapers.
"Seventh Generation Diapers. [general applause] Who needs what stage and how many cases do you need this month?"
And as all the breast-feeding, snuggly-wearing, look-at-your-child-all-the-time parents lined up to order their organic, biodegradable ink-free earth-friendly diapers, I leaned back in my chair and sighed smugly. Smoochie has been accident-free for eight days, I thought to myself. I'll never have to order diapers again. Never. And for the first time that afternoon, I relaxed and rationalized that no one would know that I used regular old environmentally not really very friendly at all Huggies for three years, that I used detergents with phosphates and perfumes and dyes, that the prunes I put in the muesli THAT VERY MORNING had not, in fact, been sun dried and contained SULFITES. . . . . when it happened.
Smoochie sauntered up to me in his wide-legged cowboy stance that means one thing and one thing only. And then he wiggled his left leg and deposited a potato-sized treasure on the environmentally-friendly deck and proclaimed loudly "Laur, I've had a terrible accident."
And thebig karmic wheel does indeed go round.
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