ANOTHER OF EUGENE A. BARIL'S RULES

"A wise son heareth his father's instruction: but a scorner heareth not rebuke." (Proverbs 13:1)

I guess it was about ten years ago that there was that dating book for females entitled, "The Rules". Well, my father had rules; and I suppose you could also call them principles or policies or even convictions. I have written about my father, Eugene A. "Gene" Baril several times on the blog. My Dad was a complicated guy; authoritarian, yet hysterically funny. He was also strict, yet sometimes surprisingly merciful. He was very politically conservative, yet he came to strongly oppose the Vietnam War and voted for George McGovern. Dad was definitely his own person. During the sideburns craze of the early 1970s, he refused to grow them.

"I'm not one of the sheep," he declared about it.

Sometimes I think I should write a book of my father's rules. Honestly, if done correctly, it would be one of those "reads" that would be kind of interesting to a lot of people. It would not be some great work of prose like "War and Peace". Rather, it would be the kind of thing you'd enjoy leafing through in the bathroom.

Today as I saw a young man at a supermarket struggling to push a large cluster of shopping carts (or "carriages" as they're usually called in New England) I thought of another of his rules that I usually DO follow. Dad did 95% of the grocery shopping in the family. Unlike most fathers of his generation, he believed grocery shopping was the MAN'S job and his rule was that he ALWAYS wheeled his shopping cart back into the store when he was done. Dad considered it very lazy and irresponsible to just leave your shopping cart in the parking lot. Now, those "outdoor corrals" of carts that we see today were NOT so popular in the pre-1980 days, but I don't think he'd have thought much of them. You wheeled your cart back into the store; OR if you saw a shopper arrive and get out of their car when you'd just finished up with yours, you offered it to that person. The only time I have ever deviated from my father's rule is when I had very young children. If you've got a two-year-old with you, it can be a pain in the neck to wheel the cart all the way back and then bring your kid back to the car. Otherwise, I always follow my father's rule. And, certainly he'd apply it to DEPARTMENT stores as well as grocery stores.

At this busy shopping season, I don't think following Dad's shopping cart rule would be a bad idea! After all, it's one of those, "random acts of kindness" we often hear we should be doing.