The Seven Stages of the Dwarves

I was standing in line at the tobacco counter the other day. I had finished some grocery shopping and throughout my travels up and down the aisles I had this recurring vision of winning a lottery. Not one to tempt fate, I decided to buy a ticket. As I stood in line, I juggled the groceries around in my arms and fished some money out of my pockets for the tickets. There were only two other people in the line in front of me so I thought the ice cream I purchased should still be frozen by the time I got to the car. However, what I didn’t count on was the guy in the line in front of me being what could only be described as a lottery professional. He had a stack of tickets about the size of a deck of cards, and each one had to be scanned by the computer to verify his winnings or as it turned out his non winnings. In my estimation, and I had lots of time to do my estimating, maybe a quarter of them were winning tickets. My first thought was why didn’t he check them at home and only bring in the winners? But then I thought maybe the scanning of the tickets is all part of the entertainment for some people. Although, to give some educational credit, I now know the French for “No prize”. It was bored into my brain with the same cadence of a Gregorian chant.

By this time my arm was growing a bit numb from the ice cream and I thought that maybe splurging 5 cents on a plastic bag wouldn’t have been such a bad idea after all. But I had renewed hopes as the cashier was finally done with the scanning and had totaled the man’s winning. Those hopes were dashed when the man began to buy more tickets with the grace and reverence of a wine connoisseur. I would not have been surprised at all if he had held them to his nose and sniffed them. As I said before, I had lots of time to think.

Finally, the next person ahead of me shuffled up to the counter and laid open a plastic folder on the counter. This was not a good sign. He had selections in Pro Line Sports, Pro Picks and Point Spread and was reeling off phrases that were as foreign to me as ordering a Timmies coffee is to an American. By this time my ice cream was about to start dripping onto the floor so when my opportunity eventually did come, I quickly bought my tickets and I scurried out the door, hoping not to leave a Chocolate Mocha trail behind me. It was then that I realized how quickly I went from being in an excellent mood into being grouchy.

I never really thought I would hit this stage, but I have become rather grouchy lately. Fortunately for all around me I haven’t quite made the leap to grumpy, but as it is, grouchy can be bad enough. I don’t become obnoxious to the people around me, it is more that I am grouchy to the rest of the world; politicians for one. I just don’t seem to have any patience for their rhetoric anymore. Conservatives, Liberals, NDP, Green it doesn’t matter what the political stripes are, I just don’t have time for their petty bickering of whose fault it is and whose fault it isn’t and whose fault it is that something isn’t being done quickly enough or whose fault it is that things are being done too quickly and recklessly. I am tired of hearing that our national troubles can be laid at the feet of a previous government 75 years ago, or 30 years ago or 2 years ago. If I was within earshot of a politician I would simply tell them to shut up, sit down, accept the responsibility of their action, their parties action and proceed accordingly. But that is about as likely to happen as a snake crawling back into its discarded skin. How is that for an apt metaphor?

When I was a bit younger, I didn’t really notice the fine line between grouchy and grumpy. As an illustration, grouchy to me is using the greatest invention of the world; the mute button on my remote control. I can sit and mumble to myself, but happy in the knowledge that I didn’t have to listen to that crap on the TV anymore. Grumpy would be leaving the sound on during the news and getting all worked up over those aforementioned politicians and telling everyone in the neighbourhood my rather unrelenting opinion, because the rest of the world is wrong and only I am aware of its inanity. In talking with my wife and children, this is a phase they are not necessarily looking forward to.

In our propensity to always categorize and sequentially rate life and death just as Dr. Kübler-Ross did with her stages of grief, I think in life, we will all progress through the Seven Stages of the Dwärves. I have made my way through Happy (the 1970's, not surprisingly), Bashful (for most of my youth), Sleepy (the child rearing phase), Sneezy (during that one particular summer of hay fever) and Dopey (although a case for the 1970's can be made here as well). Still to come, I’m sure, will be the Doc stage where I will be analyzing every medical symptom as they are presented in my friends and myself as we keep aging and the ever popular Grumpy to carry me down the stretch.

I think grouchy is kind of like a way station on the way to grumpy. It’s a place you have to get through before moving on. Like being in the Little Leagues. I don’t want to deride grumpy as a state of mind, or an undesirable place to be. God knows I will probably reach that stage soon enough and in all likelihood I will probably revel in my grumpiness.