I am a well-known crazy aficionado. My husband calls me a “crazy anthropologist”. I love to get close to crazy people and study them like a scientist. It’s a little hobby of mine. It’s pretty safe to say that I am well-versed in various kinds of crazy. Usually, I have to go looking for the crazy, but yesterday, God gave me a gift in the form of one of the biggest loons I’ve ever met. I was sitting at my son’s soccer practice, listening to some people yammer about building a deck when all of a sudden, this woman burst on the scene with her three children. One ran onto the field because he was late for practice.
“I’m so sorry he’s late!” she yelled. “Also, sorry he didn’t play well last week! He was really backed up!”
She plopped down beside me with her two children and proceeded to tell me that her son needed to have his small intestine checked because he suffers from celiac disease. She thought he seemed out of it at the last game and didn’t play that well. Honestly, I didn’t notice a problem, mainly because he’s in a six-year old league and it’s a miracle if the kids are running in the right direction.
“I thought he seemed sluggish and it turned out he was all backed up but now he’s pooped plenty and he’s better.”
I really didn’t know how to answer that so I made some noise that sounded like agreeing. In the meantime, her daughter started pulling up grass and eating it (she was about 18 months old). The mom freaked out when she noticed.
“Don’t eat that, Baylee!” She yelled. (I’m sure that is the correct spelling of her daughter’s name, because she told me). “Who knows what kind of chemicals they are spraying on this grass to keep it green?”
I made another agreeing sound, because, really, who knows how someone gets grass that green in an arid climate? This led to a diatribe on chemicals being sprayed on grass and its relationships to:
- Tumors in dogs
- Infertility
- Gastrointestinal problems
- A little girl she knows who has cancer but will be fine because kids can shake cancer off pretty fast
“It’s no coincidence to me that the infertility centers are in the same towns that spray lawns. I have a friend who ended up with all kinds of fertility problems. Listen to this – her parents used to use bug spray all the time where she grew up in Arkansas. What kind of parents would do that?”
At this point, she took out a sandwich and began cramming it in her daughter’s mouth. The daughter didn’t appear hungry but her mother was determined. Jelly was coming out of the sandwich and spilling over the child’s neck since she wouldn’t open her mouth.
I pointed out that bugs can get pretty aggressive in that part of the country. If the woman was around my age, her parents probably didn’t think the chemicals would have negative effects. People didn’t think about things like that in the late seventies and early eighties. Her parents probably meant well. She informed me that her friend had to use donor eggs and was able to eventually conceive with them. She feels that if someone mapped out the instances of infertility and the use of chemicals on lawns, there would be a pattern. Then she brought up the harmful effects of coal dust. Unfortunately for her, she didn’t have much to teach me there, as I am from West Virginia and already know that coal dust is Satan’s brew. She seemed kind of disappointed that I had heard of it.
I got bored with that so I asked her how she figured out that her son had celiac disease. This led to a dramatic story involving “soupy” diapers and grunting. She even stood up and acted some of it out. I noticed that some of the other parents were starting to stare. It turns out that she diagnosed him with a reflexology chart and then demanded the doctor do some blood tests. She also told me that she went gluten free while nursing her daughter (neither she nor her daughter have a gluten problem) but then tried gluten again and gained two pants sizes immediately. Her theory is that most people can’t tolerate gluten anymore because of the chemicals they use to treat it with. She heard that the grain in grain elevators is treated with formaldehyde to keep the rats away.
She promised to sit with me at the next game. Unfortunately, we don’t have a game this weekend, dammit. I’m going to bring up organic fruit and raw milk.
