I'd Rather Chip in for a Dalmatian
In Big Bear Lake, the Starbucks where I’m now sitting has a display of bottled water near the cash register. “Do you want to donate a bottle of water to the firefighters?” the barista asks customers as she rings them up.
“Huh?” I replied.
“There are big wildfires they’re fighting now,” she said. “A couple of them died.”
Mountain communities are especially grateful to firefighters, and I’m sympathetic to them myself, but something seemed amiss.
“I used to cover firefighters as a reporter in the Inland Empire,” I said. “I rode along on the front lines of the Grand Prix Fire.”
“So you want to donate,” the cashier said.
“I don’t think so,” I replied.
She gave me a dirty look with my change.
What I still can’t figure is why I would donate water to firefighters by buying a single 12 ounce bottle in Starbucks — or why I would donate water of all things to firefighters at all. Isn’t it the single commodity that they always possess in great quantities? I’m starting to worry that these fires are going to take a long time indeed to put out.
Your mother should be ashamed
— Lasorda · Sep 6, 06:15 AM · #
Curious post. I think the sales clerk was tossing the $1.59 (or whatever) into a bank deposit not a barrel of water. Probably it was buying something besides water—maybe ‘electrolyte replacement beverage’? And to the sales clerk Our Host’s refusal to ‘buy a bottle of water for the firefighters’ was actually a refusal to toss some small change into an ad-hoc fund for them.
No doubt Our Host knows this or could have found out that this (or something similar) was the true description on the transaction. But he says he was puzzled by the idea of buying firefighters DRINKING water. After all—they obviously have lots of the stuff left to pour on the fire after they’ve drunk their fill from the hose.
He obviously lives a life with a poverty of metaphor. He should examine the sub-species called metonymy. James Thurber wrote a lovely little story about the enriching effects of a mind filled with such things.
Sad little encounter between two strangers recounted here. Something that has meaning when you think about it. One of those things to be avoided.
— JohnMcC · Sep 6, 07:23 PM · #
John McC,
Actually, the barista was asking me to buy an actual, physical, 20 ounce bottle of water — one that she held up in her and, and that I was to put in a little basket marked “water donated to firefighters” if I purchased it. So you’re pretty much as wrong as it’s possible to be on this one.
— Conor Friedersdorf · Sep 6, 10:05 PM · #
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It’s awesomely surreal, Conor.
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