It
was the Last Reasonable Shopping Day before Christmas. That is to
say, it was Christmas Eve Eve.
You could certainly shop on actual
Christmas Eve, if you were inclined to be desperate or insouciant;
heck, the particularly intrepid might make a sport of finding gifts –
however inappropriate – at the odd gas station open Christmas
morning (“Look, Grandma! I got you a deck of cards and this month's
issue of Custom
Rides!”)
But for most people, Christmas Eve Eve is it
for
Christmas shopping,
and that's why Walmart was a madhouse.
But
that's not why I was there. I take an extremely dim view of
self-inflicted stress, which leads to my usually having the Christmas
cards, decorating, and gifts dispensed with in an almost disturbingly
prompt fashion. However, despite my reluctance to deal with the
surging, spending masses, there I was, because I love animals.
I
volunteer with a local animal rescue group that has a small shelter
housing about a dozen cats. The shelter would be closed for almost 2
weeks over the Christmas holidays, and I volunteered to foster
Paulie, a frantically affectionate Russian Blue, for the duration. I
realized, though, since I was keeping Paulie separated from our own
pets (the stress-aversion thing, remember), he would need some basic
supplies of his own: food and water dishes, litter and scoop, etc.
So: Walmart, on the last reasonable shopping day.
You
can imagine the scene: parking lot jammed with lines of cars creeping
toward the exits or hovering, vulture-like, for available spaces;
shoppers, bundled and bustling, striding purposefully toward the
entrance or exiting laden with purchases, and of course, the little
red kettle of the Salvation Army, attended by a cherubic 50ish lady
in a Santa hat.
It
is very difficult to walk by one of those little red kettles without
stopping to donate. You start to think as you approach, “If I stop
to donate on the way in, will she remember when I have to walk back
past on the way out? If I just walk past on the way in, will she
think I'm a hopeless tightwad with no Christmas spirit, or will she
assume I mean to donate on the way out?”
I
reckoned that it's best to leave a favorable impression, so I decided
to donate on the way out. Trying to look like I was definitely not
skulking,
I walked past the red kettle and the nice lady and into the store.
After finding and purchasing the needed items with impressive ease
(the folks at Walmart clearly saw the Last Reasonable Shopping Day
coming and scheduled accordingly), I walked out the door and
approached the kettle, whose motherly attendant smiled encouragingly
as I groped in my pocket for a donation. I usually give loose change
(because I actually am
a hopeless tightwad), but today, full of the holiday spirit, I
decided to pony up a dollar. Unfortunately,
my dollar bills were folded neatly inside my fives, tens, and
twenties. My attempt to extricate them while still inside my pocket
(to avoid showing the nice lady what I could
be giving) resulted in several bucks fluttering to the ground
underneath the kettle. Embarrassed, I joked with the lady about not
being able to hold on to money while bending to snatch the bills
before they became airborne in the winter breeze. I
retrieved the money lying underneath the little red kettle – which
is made of metal, by the way – which is suspended from a red
tripod, also made of metal – which is surmounted by a large
Salvation Army sign that you probably don't even notice, because it's
so well known who stands there ringing the bell. The sign, which you
don't notice until you come up from beneath it after picking up your
fallen money, is in a frame, also made of – imagine if you will –
metal.
I know for sure
it was metal, because of the distinctive bonggg
it made when colliding with my ascending skull. The sweet lady,
aghast, put a comforting hand up to my head and murmured consolation.
Making another
lame joke about “giving till it hurts”, I stuffed all
the bills in the little red kettle. I
can
take a hint, after all. Here's
hoping you don't have to get the Christmas spirit knocked into your
head this year! Here's another story about when I was dumb: https://allsortsartbyali.blogspot.com/2014/12/philadelphia-is-as-you-know-or-may-at.html Image credit: https://www.pexels.com/photo/photo-of-man-holding-bell-3428095/
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