Be Careful? Not “Have a Good Day”?

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No matter how full the tank, empty is always on the horizon.

-Brilliant Bill

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I stepped into Walgreens for a box of chocolates and a pouch of sea-salted cashews Saturday afternoon. After the checkout process, the kindly old lady on the other side of the counter sent me off with an ominous “Be careful.” My brow furrowed, and I said, “Careful of what?” She was startled into momentary silence, finally mumbling, “People are crazy out there.”

This “Be careful” seems to be a current language trend. Also, the “Be safe out there.” Maybe this is now more appropriate to our time than “Have a good day.” Have our expectations now been lowered from the “good day” to just surviving? Language triggers me, and the Walgreens’ lady’s triggered me…

Be careful? I’m almost 80, and I’ve survived, in relative chronological order:

Being a first born to rabidly strict, psychologically off-centered Irish-Catholic parents.

Eight years Catholic elementary school tyranny.

First generation of children raised in a world where total human annihilation is a reality.

Fights and crime and the criminal justice system as part of a teen street gang (Demons).

Dropping out of high school.

Bad boy days, circa 1971.

Military basic training.

A Saturday night attack by knife-wielding thugs in Montgomery, Alabama.

The summer of love in San Francisco.

A year in the Vietnam “conflict.”

Some years as a Teamster trucker.

A few years of closed-circuit motorcycle roadracing. (And a few 130-mph police pursuits on public roadways.)

A U.S. university education.

Fending off several mugging attacks on the mean streets of U.S. cities.

Years of “business travel” and “swindle sheets.”

A bad dose of oysters in New Orleans.

Ten years in the Washington lobbying world.

A mid-afternoon bicycle ride in Phoenix on the hottest day ever recorded there — 122 degrees, June 26, 1990.

Some years of living and working with the poor in a slum neighborhood.

Four trips driving across the U.S. each in two days time, one on motorcycle.

Ten years working with California’s worst in max-security prisons.

Seven years married to a woman who now believes there is a system of underground transportation passageways secretly enabling a class of beings controlling this world, and that her $500 in Iranian currency will soon be worth millions when the impending currency flip happens.

I guess it could have been worse, but now you tell me to, “be careful”? Careful of what?