Posted this a while back on Facebook, but it seemed like a good one to start with if I plan on taking the blog in more of a writing direction:

If you hit the donut shop too late Saturday morning, you usually suffer in terms of selection, but make up for it with the fact that they typically throw in a couple more donuts than they charge you for. Such was the case at 11:00 this morning when the two old latina ladies at the next table were the only other donut eaters left and it was clearly time to give away or throw away on the less popular donuts. A free cinnamon twist and sprinkle donut for us, some cheaply bought customer loyalty for them.  As we enjoyed our shrewdly acquired donut buffet, I couldn’t help but notice one of the old ladies continuing to look at the girls. This is not entirely unusual since by any objective standard, they are beautiful girls.  But the looks were a little persistent.

The ladies rose to leave and threw away their trash, but much to my dismay, staring lady headed toward our table rather than the door.

“You have beautiful girls,” she said.

“Oh, thank you–they take after their mother,” said I, in an attempt to sound endearingly deferential, while feeling more than confident that the full lips and long lashes were a dead giveaway that I too was a genetic contributor.

“Do you like to read books to your girls?” As she asked, I could see she was missing many of her front teeth and those that remained were an affront to modern dentistry.

“Yes, we do,” I said, “we love to read.” I was alternatively distracted by the missing teeth and whether I should be offended that it was even questioned whether I read to my children, for I am a hyper-literate, over-educated, intellectual elitist, where the question of whether I read to my children should not be a question at all.

“I have some books in the car,” she said, “would it be okay to give them to your girls?”

Though I said it would, I wondered as she went to her car whether she was going to return with books that were designed to indoctrinate my children with teachings from the Mormon church, or the Jehovah’s Witnesses. I decided it was going to be Jehovah’s Witness, but I had not decided whether to just accept the material and explain to the girls why we were throwing it away after she left, or whether I should refuse the books and explain to her the problems with her religion, starting with their treatment of the Trinity. I was far along in my internal theological debate, and winning in an intellectual landslide of sorts, when she returned from her car with two very normal looking children’s books and some beanie baby teddy bears.

“I had bought them for my granddaughter,” she said. She reached out and stroked Penny’s head and added, “she was about their age.”

What would normally be the offensive act of a stranger touching my children, was tolerated as I noticed her use of the past tense “was”, coupled with the fact that there were still tags on the Beanie Babies.

She proceeded to tell me how her granddaughter had recently been killed when a drunk driver flipped his car into the yard where she was playing with her brothers and cousins. Though the other four children survived, they were permanently disabled. Tears welled in her eyes as she told me what a miracle it was that the four had survived and that two others had gone inside right before it happened and were spared injury.

“Such a miracle can only be from God,” she said, “He truly answers prayer.”

And so she left, without receiving the benefit of any of my learned instruction, but rather delivering a lesson on how proper perspective can change one’s focus from what has been done to them, to what has been done for them. I, on the other hand, through a well polished confidence and a winning smile, had been able to get a free donut.

But thanks to my hyper-literate, over-educated, intellectually elitist background, I was able to call upon the words of the great Shakespeare, immortalized in Much Ado About Nothing, as I thought to myself:

“…masters, do not forget to specify, when time and place shall serve, that I am an ass.”