Categories: uncategorized
Date: 03 June 2007 21:56:49
Did the Sunday Morning Church Waltz -- drove back into town to drop Teen Boy off at another church for fun youth stuff. Like maybe they were going to the batting cages? Something like that.
Didn't have any cash for him, so hubby zipped my van around a side street to the nearby KMart. We needed some antifreeze anyway, so we'd just get him some change from that card purchase.
Found a store humming with Sunday shoppers and maybe two little cashiers. Yup. You should have seen the line.
Then both lines backed up because the cashiers in those places cannot do just anything and everything they want to with their machines. Some functions need a manager's approval.
IT HELPS IF YOU HAVE A FEW BLOODY MANAGERS ON HAND!
*Sigh*
Hubby started us on a trek around the store to find an open cash register without a long line.
Every department where you might expect someone able to help with that, there was no one working. The store would have been devoid of all human life if it weren't for us customers.
I finally landed at the Jewelry counter behind a lady in one of the Western adaptations of all-covered-up Muslim dress. I had seen her and her husband (one assumes) and their children around the store.
I wanted to ask them why she had to be 100% covered up in hot black clothing except for her little face peeking out like a nun's ... but yet their little daughter was permitted to run about with bare shoulders in a sundress. I assume at puberty she'd have to cover up.
I also wanted to shake her and her husband both about her black, hot attire. Lord have mercy. At leasit wear a light breezy outfit that covers all, something more appropriate for the Sauna Swamp that is our home here. I swear she was in black polyester. She must absolutely bake all summer long.
But, well, most such women are perfectly happy dressng like that, I assume. If they weren't, at least while they are here in a supposedly free country, they could rebel, if it meant enough to them to break free. I'd go insane, me.
So we finally at long last get free of the place. I had tried to keep my attitude up -- but I failed. I was grumpy.
Then as husband and son and I walked along the row of cars to my van, around the side of another vehicle skipped a little girl.
She was perhaps six years old. Her shiny stick-absolutely-straight blonde hair was pulled up in a bouncy, artistically-messy ponytail. Very stylish. Her delicate dark eyebrows were straight across her fair little forehead, model-perfect, an elf-and-fairy perfect flat horizon of eyebrow, showcasing her blue Downs eyes.
She saw me and her eyes lit up! How could I not smile at her?
Then I suppose she assumed I knew her. Maybe I was someone in the crowd of adults she'd met from school or church, in her mind.
Or maybe it was because she and I had a little kindred-spirit thing going. Her in her little cheerful colorful striped sundress and brilliant flashing sunny personality, and me in all my flowing billowing gauzy skirt and turquoise tank top and silver and turquoise bracelets and necklaces and swinging moon-and-stars earrings.
She smiled wide and waved and ran to meet me (thank goodness past a couple of parked cars and not across a lane of moving vehicles). She threw her arms around me in a hug, telling me hello.
Of course I bent down to her and hugged her back! "Hello! Who are you? What's your name?"
She smiled as she drew back -- her mother didn't even address me, simply scolded Hailey for flitting around in a busy parking lot. I picked up her name from the scolding.
She had a lovely well-healed and fading straight line of open-heart-surgery scarring on her little chest, visible above her little sundress. Another indication that she was a Downs child, along with the eyes and the round features.
Hailey indicated her mother -- "That's my mother". The woman didn't look much older than Hailey. Not hardly old enough to be mother to the three kids there with her. Step-mom? Adoptive mom? Just got an early start? And Hailey was the oldest child there.
How much heartache does it take to make a mother into a pinched crab at no more than 30 or so?
And would the rest of Hailey's childhood with the woman be as sterile and unsociable as that encounter in the parking lot would have been, had Hailey not lit it up?
She cured me of my unkind irritation with the Muslim family (still trapped back in the store. The young wife was stuck waiting for the Manager Clones to bud off another one to help).
I felt like going back inside and apologizing to them for wanting to shake them. Hailey would have hugged them.
I wanna go live in Hailey's World. I wanno go live where defects can be cured with an operation, where bouncy ponytails flutter above colorful sundresses, and where unusually-dressed ladies you meet at KMart are a cause for joy.