New Year's Resolutions

I don't put much stock in New Year's resolutions. I never really make any but my girlfriend had been bugging me about being too opinionated. She thinks I tend to be too quick to judge a book by its cover. She is young and somewhat naive and utopian in her views. She has not been knocked around by the realities of the world enough yet to acquire my healthy dose of skepticism about things. So I told her that my New Year's resolution would be to try to be less judgmental.

Last week I was about to launch into a project to make it easier for me to remove and replace the floating cover on my pool. I decided I needed one of these things to keep down the heat loss due to evaporation. The $450 gas bill for December also helped solidify this decision. I use gas only to heat my pool. My house is heated with electric heat, an equally costly proposition. However that is the way it was when I bought the place and I have not changed over to gas because I feel safer without little blue flames burning away inside my walls.

Anyway, the point is that I needed to do a little "hardware store engineering" to rig a pulley system to drag the floating cover off and on my pool. Hardware store engineering is my term for when you have an idea of how to do something but it cannot really gel until you are standing in the aisles of a well stocked hardware store contemplating the myriad of choices of doohickeys and thing-a-ma-bobs that can be used to accomplish the task at hand. So I set off on a trip to the hardware store.

On the way into the hardware store a scruffy fellow in a wheelchair on the sidewalk yelled out to me that he needed help getting into the store and asked that I hold the door open for him. One look at this guy told me that the proprietors of this establishment probably would not want him in their store. He had the patina of a homeless person and the demeanor of someone up to no good as well. But remembering my New Year's resolution, I thought "let's not be so judgmental" and decided to help him into the store. By the time I got there he had rolled his wheelchair up to the door, which opened automatically. What he really needed was a push over the threshold. Another patron was behind him and in front of me so the fellow asked him for a push. The patron took one look at him and threw up his hands and backed off. His body language said it all: "I am not touching that wheelchair or anything in it".

So it was up to me to take hold of the wheelchair handles and propel him into the store. This I did and once inside he positioned his chair such that it blocked the main aisle and started hollering that he needed to see a manager. I squeezed by him and headed off down an adjacent aisle to begin my engineering project. As I moved away I heard him say something about needing a combination lock. A manager did come forward and pointed him to a display with locks and such and I went on about my business. A few moments later I heard a ruckus up near the lock display. One of the female managers had caught him stuffing merchandise into his pocket. He was promptly thrown out of the store.

Yes, in doing my good deed I had rolled a shoplifter into my favorite hardware store. I felt like an accomplice to a well planed bit of chicanery. I also felt stupid for letting a dumb New Year's resolution override my own sensibilities. I am not giving up entirely on the "trying to be a better person" thing,a but I am not going to turn into a utopian either. I am going to continue to trust my suspicions and act upon them wisely.

The moral to this story is: Sometimes you can tell a book by its cover, especially if you already know the plot.

Happy New Year!