Tears and Laughter: Are you trapped by your heredity and your environment?

I think it was Erma Bombeck who said once that we are trapped by our heredity and our environment.

I didn’t understand it at the time, but I am beginning to get it now because the older I get the more I find myself becoming like my Granddaddy McClure.

Thomas Pratt McClure.

God bless his soul.

He was a regular card I tell you. And we loved him.

We did.

Most people who knew him really liked him. But, politely speaking, the man was an unusual person.

He had his own way of looking at things and if he felt a certain way about something there was no changing his opinion. Facts didn’t so much matter.

After he retired, he became a big fan of Kmart. He had friends that would socialize at the deli inside, and Mama always said he was in there memorizing prices. He knew the price of everything to the cent. He was a touch tight with his dollars.

We began to notice that anytime he went to Kmart he would park way out to himself in the parking lot.

“In Siberia,” my brother would always say.

And being that we were kids, it became a habit for us practically every Saturday when we would pass his favorite Kmart to scan the outer edges of the parking lot searching for his car.

That was the other part. He drove this old red Nova with a black top. Not a new automobile by any stretch. But he was still particular about it, and didn’t want anybody to bump it or scratch it or open a car door against it.

We thought it was just hilarious the way he would do this. We joked that he parked so far out that he and Granny had to hike into the store.

Now fast forward a slight 35 years.

I zipped into the Piggly Wiggly parking lot yesterday the same way I do several times a week. The first car I met was going the wrong way through a lane of parked cars.

I got through that and met another car doing the same thing on the next row.

I parked, put the truck in front of me – a turkey hunter I’m pretty sure – had pulled too far into his space so that I couldn’t pull all the way into mine, so I had to find another spot.

There was an SUV that had parked in such a way that it took up four parking spaces. It took some degree of skill just to park that way.

Then I found myself parking way out in the parking lot.

“In Siberia,” I thought.

And that’s when it hit me.

I am getting more like him every day.

We really are trapped by our heredity and our environment.

Amanda Walker is a columnist with The West Alabama Watchman, Al.com, and The Wilcox Progressive Era. Contact her at https://www.facebook.com/AmandaWalker.Columnist.