Random Acts of Sadness

A few weeks ago a bottle of Newman's Own Olive Oil and Vinegar salad dressing fell out of my cart at Gristedes and broke, spilling its contents all over the floor. Last week, I dropped a container of yogurt, which also opened and spouted forth its contents. Yesterday my victim was a package of cut fruit in syrup, something I was toying with purchasing as it reminded me of the "mouse salads" my mom used to make me for my birthday (green jello topped with half of a canned pear, licorice tail, and gummi fruit nose). Besides the fact that I'd never dropped and broken anything in a grocery story (at least in my adult life) before the first incident, my initial reaction to this event--the first and subsequent times--was that of immeasurable sadness. Not so much from my own shame, which was quite small, but more from something about the salad dressing, the yogurt, and the diced fruit themselves, their original purpose to please, now dashed.

A friend loaned me a copy of David Foster Wallace's collection of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never do Again, correctly intuiting my sense of humor, and as I was delightedly reading the title essay with the comfort of a shared sensibility, I was suddenly forced to back away from this communion when his talk turned to suicide. The humor was no longer a comfort but a thing of sorrow; a sad and eerie legacy. Morbid humor attached to the actual, and fatal morbidity of the author made me sad for him and for me, who thought he was funny.

I found that The Woman in White is not a book that I can read on the subway and so I read it at night, and Prep on the train. It was a NYT bestseller a couple of years ago, and seemed to have enough backbone to meet my (low) standards. The narrator, a teenage girl, is consistently sad or saddened, and the chapters are littered with admissions of mournfulness. This passage, as she watches her father having coffee and a cookie struck me as being among some of the more sad things in the book, and maybe in the world: "It seemed heartbreaking that he liked the taste of a sugar cookie dipped in coffee, that it was a treat to him. The small rewards we give ourselves--I think maybe there is nothing sadder." Which brings me back, of course, to diced fruit and salad dressing, and the other sad things in the supermarket and in the world.