Lessons in Odd Places

So I’m pulling into the Krogers parking lot anxious to get in, get my loaf of bread and hurry home.

I’m hungry.

Not only that, but I’ve been some three hours away from home, the longest I’ve left my two Bostons and I’m wondering what sort of havoc they’ve wreaked. 

I say that, but in reality, they’re really good dogs. The most they’ve done when I’m not there to entertain them is to snore really loudly.

Nevertheless, I’m a tad bit worried and I spot a primo parking space real close to the door, thinking this might chop a few seconds off my abandonment guilt. But there’s a LOL (aka little old lady) taking her lovely time walking the few steps across my parking space. She’s bent way the heck over into one of those backs that comes only as a gift from osteoporosis. I stifle my impatience. But I still can’t keep from wondering why in God’s name she didn’t get someone else to do her grocery shopping. I mean, look at her! She can barely walk!

Finally she hobbles past my space and I pull in, kill the engine, grab my purse and bounce out, locking the door with my remote before bounding toward the front door.

I pass the old girl on my way. She’s slowly, carefully, gingerly easing herself down into the driver’s seat of her car.

Into the Krogers I go, grab my loaf of bread (along with three or four sundry items), swipe my card and hurry out. It’s only when I’m pulling out that I notice how my perfect parking space had been between her car and the basket return. The old girl had been RETURNING HER BASKET!

Now this might not be such a big deal where you come from but here in my town, it’s not typical. You’re more apt to find a cart abandoned behind your car when you come out. Or worse yet, left to roll into the passenger side of your spanking new BMW. You’re less likely to see a decrepit old soul, tapping into the last reserves of her energy to put her basket where it belongs.

When I shared this story with my teenager, he reminded me that it was typically the younger shoppers leaving the baskets. “But older people have been brought up differently,” he said.  

His words, not mine.

May people never cease to amaze you . . . in wonderful and uplifting ways!