Suggestion Redux

Have I told this story before? I mean there have been something like 700 posts on this silly thing, and sometimes I lose track...

Stop me if you've heard this before.

I was late for my flight. Security was pre-9/11 style, but still fairly time consuming. With my one carry-on swinging from my shoulder, I raced and dodged the meandering terminal crowd.

Then, SHE caught up with me, walking in my direction, zigging when I zigged, zagging when I zagged. She was plain, but not unattractive. She wore a plain shimmering jade dress with a head scarf. She looked religious, but not pious. Not eastern, but not really western either.

Her voice was sing-song with an ethereal lilt. If there is another spiritual plane, she had been there. Perhaps she was from there... Who knows?

She carried in her hand a three-ring binder, and as we walked, she proceeded to flip the glossy pages, passing by bright colorful pictures of happy flowers, white children, blue sky, funky Jesus, maybe Ganesha the elephant goddess, an African plane, loaves of bread, and a stack of money. As she closed the book and put away her little wordless story, she asked, unobtrusively and without eye contact, whether I would like to donate a dollar, which I fluidly, and without hesitation, produced and handed to her.

In a moment, she was gone, vanished into the dense traveling crowd. Gone with my dollar. Another moment later, I realized I had been bamboozled. Hypnotized. A victim of simple suggestion. I never learned who she was, who she was with, or what she intended to do with my dollar. Rather, I hurried on to catch my plane.

It is nothing new, however. Like Pavlov's dog, I am an outright sucker for suggestion. I have been known to actually stand up out of my chair, put on my shoes and drive to Carl's Jr, just because of that stupid sauce-all-over-your-face commercial. Goddamn do I love the Western Bacon Cheeseburger...

And so it was tonight. Chatting with a friend this afternoon, I learned that she had eaten hot pizza with cold cheap beer for lunch. The mere sound of such a thing, just hours before dinner, made my mouth water (DING!) .

Dinner tonight, therefore, was not hard to figure out.