March 29, 2024

Column: Rumor has it

The rumor mill is a frightful place to get information, but then again, everyone loves to gossip. There is an entire industry built on digging up dirt on famous people. It’s a shameful thing, but that doesn’t stop me from glancing at the headlines as I check out at the grocery store. I suppose it’s just human nature to make the stories bigger and more juicy. I mean who wants to read about boring things, like celebrities being normal human beings.

I’m not perfect. I know I’ve partaken in a little gossip myself, but nothing super exciting and never in a public forum.

Growing up in a small town, rumors would spread faster than wildfire. Most of the information was harmless. Just something for people to talk about over coffee in the morning or on bar stools in the evening.

My parents were never fans of gossip. So we generally kept conversations to our own lives and talked about people as positively as we could. We weren’t saints. I remember on more than one occasion my Mom or Dad being angered by something someone else did to them. They would come home and vent, but that was the end of it. They didn’t complain to anyone who would spread it around, and they certainly wouldn’t make things up just to hurt the person. It was their problem, and they dealt with it.

But even that hasn’t kept my parents out of the rumor mill.

One of the most prominent examples happened just a few years ago. Mom had been a softball coach for more than 20 years. She was head softball coach until I was about 5 years old then took some time off when my siblings and I were growing up. She got the job back when my sister and I were high school. Even after we graduated, mom remained the coach for five or six more years.

She had finally decided she needed to slow down, so she announced her intention to retire from coaching after the season — telling her kids she needed to take it easy for health reasons.

It turns out, that was the wrong thing to say. After softball was over, Mom and Dad left for their usual summer vacation. They were gone for a little longer than two weeks. When they returned, they expected the grass to be long because they had only made arrangements to have it mowed once. It was nicely trimmed and grass clippings had been hauled away.

Apparently, it had gotten around town that Mom had four months to live and was away getting treatment for Lord only knows what disease. One of her former students mowed the grass, not wanting her to come home to a bad looking lawn.

Mom wasn’t dying, that was false. More accurately, it was a lie. Nothing really bad happened because of it. I think eventually people realized when Mom walked into school on the first day that everything was just fine, and the gossip eventually went away. To top it off, Mom came back and coached one more year, laying to rest any doubts about the strength of her health.

There is a point where people need to remember to not believe everything you hear. That is my motto. I have my close friends and family as confidants, other than that, personal information remains private, just as it should be.

More harm than good can come from talking about someone else’s life. Remember a little saying called “love thy neighbor?” It’s in a pretty important book. A person should worry more about spreading the love and a little less about something that doesn’t concern them.

I’ve rolled my eyes at the “spread love not hate” slogans because to me it’s common sense. But perhaps it’s good for some people to have a reminder.

Contact Pam Rodgers at
prodgers@newtondailynews.com