Eye of the Beholder

by Jeffe Kennedy

Morning glories are weeds, by most definitions. Bindweed being one of the more common names for them

I learned this when a friend, who grew up on a farm in Ohio, took one look at the mass of wild morning glories in my back yard, hissed "bindweed" as if naming a demon and offered to come over with a good herbicide. These weren't the lovely purple ones like this one, but I loved seeing the dewy fresh white blossoms that covered the vine in the early shadowed hours, before the sun hit it and burned them all away. I wouldn't let him touch my morning glory vine which, after all, was hardly choking food crops. He was angry with me, that I'd suffered such a noxious weed to live.

Like many things, whether we call it a weed or a vine, bindweed or morning glory, whore or madonna, is all in the eye - and more importantly, the mind - of the beholder.

And one of the things I've learned in my lifetime so far, is you can never change anyone else's mind.

Oh, someone else might change their opinion about something, and your well-reasoned argument might play into that, but most of the time what we think is dictated by our beliefs, and those tend not to change.

Like my friend who thought in terms of farming. Anything not a food plant - or worth showing off at the county fair - had no value. If it has no value, it must be destroyed. This same guy, an inveterate bachelor, held onto the idea that he wanted a "babe." He often pointed out which women were babes and which were not. In fact, he tended to be very critical of women who did not meet his standards of beauty and womanly behavior.

He also never, ever had a date.

See, this guy was far from Prince Charming material. He could never be described as good looking. He was frequently cantankerous, exacting, past his best years. In truth, we remained friends with him because we shared responsibilities in common - and because he had no other friends.

I let most of his opinions about women go, as they weren't worth getting into. The only time we really got into it was when he complained about an otherwise attractive woman he'd see in a shop downtown, who had something of a mustache. Why wouldn't she remove it, he grumped. So I explained to him her cosmetic choices, along with the time and cash investment required, then asked him what choice he would make. Did I mention he held the purse strings tight? Yeah, that shut him up.

Meanwhile he ogled his Playboy Magazines and told bitter tales about the one woman who ever had slept with him (so far as I could tell). What he thought about women had nothing to do with them and everything to do with himself.

I think this is true of most people.