Monthly Archives: February 2011

Last summer, in the Adirondacks, we hiked up to a swimming hole with a waterfall. It was as storybook a spot as you could hope to find, except for one thing. While we were there, a couple, a man and a woman, both lit cigars. Now, there are a lot of odors that repel people that I quite enjoy; gasoline, nail polish remover, magic markers and wet paint, to name a few. Outdoors or in, I love the smell of smoke from a fire or a joint. I’ll even admit that under just the right circumstances a passing whiff of cigarette smoke can send me into a reverie. However, I draw the line at cigars.

The smell of cigar smoke is in the same category as dog poop on your shoe, a dirty litter box, rotten fish, too much chlorine and lutefisk. It is neither romantic nor evocative. In a word, it stinks.

When the smoke wafted toward us, my mother-in-law and I exchanged horrified looks. And yet, surprisingly, neither one of us, both women who are known to talk to complete strangers everywhere we go, said anything to the cigar smokers. There were lots of other people at this swimming hole (which is what kept it from moving up the scale from storybook to idyllic) and none of them said anything either.

I’d like to claim that I didn’t want to embarrass my daughter, but that’s never stopped me before. It could be that I didn’t want to start an international incident (I don’t know what language the couple was speaking, but it wasn’t English). But I think the real reason I refrained from saying anything is that I figured I didn’t have a leg to stand on. I anticipated that they would say that the great outdoors is something we are all supposed to share equally and I wouldn’t have a good comeback. While their behavior was certainly ruining my experience, I wasn’t convinced that my right not to breathe their smoke trumped their right to expel it.

There are a lot of things that I find abhorrent that others tolerate, ignore, or (gasp) enjoy. I’m not fond of other people’s children and there were plenty of them there. Clearly I couldn’t ask the parents to remove them. I don’t like it when people let their dogs run loose, but several dogs were enjoying the swimming hole as much as their oblivious owners. The only rational choice seemed to be to remove ourselves from the vicinity of the cigar smokers, which, ultimately, we did.

Recently, I’ve been reading about a movement afoot to ban outdoor smoking in parks and other public spaces. I was going to end this piece with how I feel about that, but after half a dozen tries I give up. I appreciate the dangers of second-hand smoke, and there are lots of restrictions on what you can do outside, but if the offended party can simply walk away, why do we need to create another law? Discuss amongst yourselves. I’m out of here.

I collect empty plastic bottles in a box in the garage. When the box overflows, I transfer the bottles to a thirty-gallon plastic bag, put it in the back of the car, and head for the bottle recycling station at Stop & Shop. After I park, I re-stuff the plastic bag with the bottles that have scattered and, already slightly annoyed, haul my unwieldy burden across the parking lot.

There are three machines for returns; one each for cans, plastic and glass. I walk up to the one in the middle, for plastic, and my blood pressure skyrockets, because the display reads, Error, contact service. On the rare occasion that the error message is not displayed, and I am able to start recycling my bottles, I make barely a dent in my collection before the display informs me that the machine is now full and I must contact service.

There is a phone next to the machines for these times, but it dangles false hope. Last time I was there, it was dead. The time before, it was missing altogether. Without a way to summon help, I am in a quandary. Do I walk across the parking lot to put the bag of bottles back in the car before I go into the store to find help, in which case I’ll need to retrace my steps yet again to retrieve them, or do I drag them with me into the store and risk upsetting the more fastidious shoppers? This past weekend, I went into the store, bag and all.

When I saw the line at the customer service desk, I almost cried. A sympathetic, or perhaps nervous, bagger located someone to help me. That person tapped someone to send out to the machine, but then had to track down the employee who had wandered off with the key. Once back outside, I waited while my new best friend removed unprocessed bottles from the maw of the machine, and then emptied the full bags of shredded plastic, tying them very neatly. By the time he was finished, I had been at the store for twenty minutes.

For my aggravation, I claimed one dollar and fifty-five cents.

I don’t think I can bring myself to go through that insane dance one more time. But even though I can afford to sacrifice one dollar and fifty-five cents, it would be a shame not to get that money to someone who needs it. So, next time the box in the garage overflows, I will spend the twenty minutes I would inevitably devote to shredding them at Stop & Shop, to search the web for an individual or a charity to give the bottles to. And the next time I go to the supermarket, I will resist the urge to glance at the display on the plastic bottle machine.