Preventative Maintenance

This morning after I put the children on the bus I headed down to Larry Green's Tire & Exhaust for an oil change. I waited in a nearby diner where I drank five or so cups of coffee and read One Man's Meat (A wonderful book with an unfortunate title that inspires most people my age to giggle and think of penises). After about an hour I went back to settle up.
"How's school going?" asked the man behind the morbidly obese man behind the counter.
This is always awkward. It's understandable that this man, who has seen my father pay for work on my car more often than not, would think I was still in school, and being honest with him means telling him that I am a bum.
"Actually I'm not in school right now. I need to go back to get some teaching credentials. Wish I could just teach without them. Ha ha."
The man looked at my shirt, which has my daycare's logo on the left breast, and furrowed his brow.
"Tell your dad hi for me," he said.
"What no Bush joke today?" I asked.
"What?" asked a nearby woman who had been reading and apprently eavesdropping as well.
"Oh, Cecil likes to tease my dad abut being a liberal, and he normally says somethign about Bush to him," I told her.
"I can't imagine why anybody wouldn't like Bush," she said, daring me.
"Yeah, uh, there are some reasons but you know, whatever."
"I mean, if Kerry or Gore was President I'd have had to move," she said, looking back down at her book.
"Yeah, well," I said lamely. "It's good to be able to imagine other people's point of view."
Getting into my freshly lubed car I thought about all the things I could have said to her and wondered why I had settled for self-righteous condecension.
I think it's because I work with children. It seems to me that people who work with children get too used to explaining basic concepts and principles of moral behavior. "Imagine what it's like to be someone else," is something I say at least three times a week, usually because Cody just punched Jack for taking his ball. Cody needs to learn to consider other people's feelings, as does Jack. But at Larry Green's Tire & Exhaust I couldn't hope to educate anyone; this woman was too far gone. Here I said it only as a means to save face without engaing in a pointless political debate with a mentally handicapped woman twenty yards away from a group of thick-necked mechanics who were all going to agree with her.
Maybe my words changed her. Maybe she's in the midst of internal dialogue right now, forcing herself to consider some of the myriad opinions heretofore left untouched by her too easily appeased brain. Probably not, but I'll never know. I said it with my back to her, already half out the door and ashamed of my arrogance-- still dependent on my father and talking to a middle-aged woman like I was Atticus Finch.