a quiet trip to Lowe's...not

Three days ago I was at Lowe’s to buy some 50:1 fuel for the leaf blower.

This isn’t a story about blowing leaves because leaves are evil and I don’t have time for Satan today.

Perhaps tomorrow.

Perhaps tomorrow, Satan!

See what I did there? I took the popular “not today, Satan” and gave you the subtext that’s hiding underneath. I’ll do it again, watch. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” is a widely popular and well-known holiday song. To me, the subtext of “baby, it’s cold outside” is: “You don’t want to leave because it’s worse out there.”

Isn’t that ominous?

It gets worse, but I’ll get to that later.

Right now we’re in Lowe’s buying 50:1 fuel for the leaf blower, and I’m walking through the garden area towards the register. All around me are fragrant Christmas trees large, small, and tiny. Tall, short, round, pointy, adorned with shiny bulbs or cinnamon pine cones, you name it.

In fact, for being the outdoor yard ’n garden section, with its concrete flooring and scaffold roof, it’s not a bad winter wonderland. It’s almost nice, except…

Sailing out the speakers, all around me, is the sound of a man who does not seem to understand the concept of consent. Yep, you guessed it. “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” My mind immediately returns to the yearly conversation I have with myself in my head about social responsibility, respect, misogyny, the patriarchy, consent, and rape culture. Merry Christmas indeed.

I get to the register. I set down the metal can of leaf blower fuel. I pull out my wallet.

And darn it if the extrovert in me doesn’t make an appearance.

The cashier, a middle-aged white woman starts to ring me up and I ask her, “Ma’am, I have a question for you, just to see what you think…What do you think of this song and the message it sends? Do you think we should do something about it? What’s your opinion?”

Then she pounced.

It was as if she was ready!

“This song is history,” she said. “It’s a part of history and we shouldn’t change it. It’s not right to change history.”

I gave her a puzzled, startled look. I really hadn’t seen this coming. I put my debit card into the machine and was instantly just trying to go through the motions of paying for my leaf blower fuel, but I couldn’t let it end there. I asked her about the message it sends to young people who weren’t around during this historical culture, but she wasn’t having it.

So I brought out the big gun.

“What about blackface, then? That’s a part of history but you don’t see that anymore because it’s atrocious and egregious.”

I’m as surprised as you might be right now.

Though I do like to talk to people, and have no aversion (an affinity, rather) for engaging strangers in conversation, I am not one for even the mildest of confrontations.

She was a bit flabbergasted, and perhaps more than a little frustrated, so her last arguments about the song were that “it’s a song” and “it’s cute.”

I kindly took my receipt and left her to her work, nothing gained.

If I had thoughts about “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” before, I have even more now, and not just about the song. That cashier at Lowe’s opened up a whole new anteroom of arguments I hadn’t considered. But, now that I have considered them, and since the wheels are turning even faster in my head, I’m going to write about them in a separate post, an essay.

If you would like to follow me down the wormhole as I voraciously explore the argument to the fullest extent of my abilities, go over to Essays and join me there.

If you don’t see me, I’m blowing leaves in the back yard. Or fighting Satan.

Satan brought the leaves.

I know it.