Warm Buttery Popcorn

Another Friday I’m popping corn at the middle school. Its warm, buttery smell drifts out of the booth and permeates the school with delicious aroma. It hovers in the air through the entire day as students and teachers go about their work and breathe deeply of its heavenly scent. So simple a task, just putting the corn and the oil together. But what a wonderful result comes from that simple task.

While popping, I received a phone call from an acquaintance that desperately wants to be a financial genius. She calls me up periodically when she makes a mess of things asking for advice as to how to get out. It always amazes me that with all the other wonderful talents she has, at what a kind, caring and loyal friend she is, that she feels the need to go down in history as the next Donald Trump.

Another friend and I were discussing this matter after he had just returned from the cemetery. He mentioned how little sense it made that some people try so desperately to be something they just were never meant to be. That in the cemetery lay my uncle, in a lonely grave with no flowers or special care.

This uncle had made a fortune. A remarkable achievement for a man with basically no formal education that stepped off a boat from another country and amassed enough money and assets to send five children through college. They all grew up in a big, expensive house, all attended the best colleges, and grew up to be a doctor, a judge, an engineer, and a lawyer. And all we can remember of this uncle is that he had been wealthy and now lay in this solitary grave.

Yet next to him, a few rows down, lay another aunt. She never really did anything special in life. She never even held a job. Did not graduate high school. And didn’t know the difference in Dow Jones on Wall Street and the Dow Scrubbing Bubbles. But she could bake cookies. Thousands of them. Ones with chocolate fillings, and jelly tops, and chewy centers. I would go to her house as a child and she always had some little, cheap present for me and would set a plate of the most delicious sausage polenta in front of me. I never left her house without her sticking a dollar in my hand and engulfing me in a huge hug.

Her grave was covered in flowers. Along with that of my grandmother who also would be considered a nobody on the world stage. A woman who is remembered for silly jokes and delicious macaroni. Who held my shirt as she taught me to hang out a window and push clothespins onto wet laundry on a line. Who crocheted the softest afghans to cover a chilly little girl with the flu. And who was a haven of peace in a teenaged storm.

She did nothing but work in a factory from when she was twelve years old, yet old women kissed her coffin as it wheeled down the church aisle, and the faceplate was still crooked on her gravestone from someone recently pushing it back to peer at her beloved face for one more time.
These women had evidence of people loving them strewn all over the graveyard grass. Along with the others who were remembered, the baker who gave an extra bun in your bag, the hairdresser that gave friendly counsel along with her coif, the neighbor lady that never minded when you messed up her grass. And then my wealthy uncle’s barren plot, along with scores of others, lay forgotten under the leaf strewn ground.

Nobel Prizes will be given, medals hung around necks, but after the clapping is done and the lights are turned out, so many will be forgotten. Yet so many others will never be. They show up again in every soap scented breeze, every oven door expelling the sweet heat of warm cookies, every sizzling pan of onions in hot oil.

It leads to hope that maybe it doesn’t take much to be really worth while. That maybe I, too, lived a life with great value. I never became the astronaut that I dreamed of at 13. I never became the PhD that everyone thought I would be at 17. I never became a financial giant and showed my children all the countries of the world like I dreamed of at 25. But hopefully I have done something for somebody that made their life worthwhile. That maybe many of us can be like the popcorn. That long after the machine is cleaned and everyone has gone home for the day, its warm, buttery scent still lingers for hours in the air.