10. When I stopped being crazy

When I stopped being crazy

As soon as I stepped inside my house, a strange noise struck my ears, one that I was not used to hear coming from my beloved wife. She was crying profusely, with tears running down her face and water running from her noses as if she were in a big pain. I was about to move closer to her and ask questions, but got frozen on the spot when she stared and pointed her fingers at me like she wanted to kill me. I couldn't catch what she was saying in her tirade of words that came out as fast as water running down from a gutter. She said,  
"You are crazy, completely crazy. Don’t you have anything else to do? The villagers' gossips are flooding my ears. Tons of gossips that can easily fill several garbage cans. Do you realize that? There are no physicians around that can treat such a sickness."  She then turned up her cries.
I stood like a stone, broke into a loud laugh by mistake, and quickly used my hands to cover my mouth while asking myself, "Crazy! Am I really crazy?"
I did realize that I often walked along the streets, carrying a big plastic bag on my shoulders and wandering around. I used to collect various street litters and dropped them in the bag. When it was full, I took it and dumped it into the trashcans deposited at the curbside. I had to look left and right because of the heavy and continuing traffic. Paying that much attention sometimes made me dizzy, so people on passing cars who looked at me often laughed. When I laughed back, I immediately heard them say, "He is crazy". Of course, I was often dirty and had weird attires on. They often stopped laughing and threw down empty coffee cups and other items in my direction.
I resolved not to confront my wife, as I knew too well what would happen next if I did. With a big knife in her hand, she pounded walked towards me and screamed loudly:
“You are really crazy. Do you want to die or stay alive? I cannot take it any more. Wherever I go, I was told you are crazy. ”
I forced myself to nod as if I was in agreement with her. I nodded and I smiled. In the end, she stopped being angry, sat down on a chair, and remained silent for a good twenty minutes.
I looked at her, tried to say something, but had to stop short because she spoke up first. This time, she sounded a lot quieter, showing a normal but disappointed face:
"I think most of them were right. They said you are crazy. You collected garbage along the streets, even those empty cups they threw at you. That's really crazy. If you can stop doing that, that would be a lot better. I'm so ashamed of you. When people got into arguments, you also interfered with them for no reason."
When I did not say any words, my wife stopped talking and everything was quiet again. I didn't go out anywhere for the next five days and stayed home instead. During those five days of self-retreat, I clearly visualized what truly happened in the streets. Some people carried coffee bags; others eat cakes or different kinds of fruit. Leftovers were then thrown on the curbside where they remained exposed to or got carried way by the wind. They might end up on areas where grass is grown for cattle feeding. Cattle do feed happily by themselves, unconcerned about anything else happening around them. That's just their nature.
After my wife delivered her big preaching, I had to change. A crazy guy like me did not wish to cause any domestic feud. But I did not know what to do exactly, because deep in my mind I still felt that there is room for some form of craziness in this world.
One day, I left my house dressed differently than before. I no longer used the old, flaky attires, did not carry a plastic bag, and did not collect garbage along the streets and other public places. I had a fairly decent dress on, rode my bike to those usual places that I frequented before, and noticed the same old things. I stopped at the coffee shop where people used to serve me iced coffee while treating me as a crazy person. This time, they did not serve me coffee like they used to; I had to buy my own drink, which was served not in a plastic bag but in a very nice cup. I drank my coffee like any other customers and enjoyed the surrounding.  All of a sudden, a relatively strong wind burst blew in a plastic bag out of nowhere. The plastic bag ended up covering the face of a middle age male customer sitting on my left. That wasn't fair to have one's face obstructed by accident, but who is to blame? The plastic bag had no soul of its own.
The man brushed off the plastic bag and bitterly complained:
"Damn it! Plastic bag!"
The shop owner came and asked:
"Are you OK? What a shame!"
"Pick it up, you guys," said the customer calmly.
"We can't do it all, sir. I don't know where they all came from. So many of them," replied the shop owner.
I order another cup of coffee and spent some time chatting about this incident with the unfortunate customer and the shop owner.
"A couple of days ago, I was told that one of Loung Di's cow was suffocated to death by plastic bags."
"What? It died because of plastic bags?"
"What else could it be? The autopsy uncovered a couple of plastic bags from the cow's stomach. "
The discussion stalled for a few minutes. As I was half way through my second cup of coffee, the middle-age guy said:
"I told you. People do not throw things in the public trashcans. They just throw them anywhere."
"It was better ten years ago. There used to be a crazy guy that picked them up from the streets and put them in the trashcans", added the shop owner.
"I don't know what happened to him. We don't see him any more", commented another customer on my right.
"Maybe, he is no longer crazy!", said the shop owner.
I drank my last drop of coffee and then walked to my bike thinking out loud that some day I might want to be crazy again....