'Tis the Season . . .

Mackenzie and I went shopping today.

She spent Monday night with her father. This morning, they had some Christmas pictures taken. When they had finished, Eric dropped her at my house.

I had not seen her since Thursday! She smiled warmly when my big old balloon melon coconut head floated into her vision. And she cooed.

We picked up my laptop, which had been de-virused. We bought a wheel at the junk yard for Boo's Jeep's spare tire.

We went to Sam's and ordered tires. Before she went back to Grace, we stopped at and captured some values. (Half-price lettuce, Vidalia onion, and Lay's chips, 3 pounds of Granny Smiths for 1.29, two pounds of HUGE prawns for 18.99 - a treat for Ross, a head of cauliflower for .99.)


As we waited to check out, two aisles over there was a catterwauling child, obscured by a shelf. I listened for 3 minutes or so, then went to look around the shelf. A 15-month old was sitting in the buggy while a female who might be taken to be filling the role of parent ignored him. I looked at him until she looked at me. She did nothing. Anger arose in me. I wanted to act. There were fifty people in the front of the store, and most were disgusted, but we let this be-atch get away with this benign bad behavior. The kid reminded me of Kitty Genovese . . .. The blood is on all of us.

Note to parents: give your kid the expectation that you will care about how he feels. Respect him that way. Give him a bit of time when he needs it, and make clear to him that his responsibility includes to not "cry wolf". That way, when you are in the grocery store: you are not a rude jerk, regarded as incompetent as a parent by all in your immediate area; your kid is better behaved and will receive better treatment in the world; and your grandkids will be raised by a parent who knows what-the-heck to do. If your parents did not teach you how to do the job, and if you have no instinct for it, try what I am suggesting. Your bold action will make the world so much better. Your child will be a better person, your grandchildren will have a better shot, and you will experience personal growth.

Tonight is the 40th anniversary of the evening when my father lay down in the Hillside Hotel in Madison, Indiana, after a productive day of work for the Davison Chemical Company.

He was 38 years old.

When the kitchen beneath Room 205 caught fire in the night, the old former sanitarium overlooking the Ohio River was a virtual tinderbox. Of the 33 guests that evening, all managed to escape the conflagration, save for the gentleman in 205.

He did not live to see his grandchildren or his first great-grandkid, but he did instill in his progeny an understanding of how their kids should not act in a grocery store, and how - by his example - to instruct with love their own as-yet-unborn little ones.

His own 12-year-old son awakened the morning of the 15th fatherless in this world, but not in eternity. And many years later, the guest's great-granddaughter helped her grandfather buy tires for her aunt's car, and groceries for her mother, aunts, uncle, and grandfather, without disrupting unnecessarily the peaceful goings-about of those in her midst.

I suspect, though, that her grandfather may have some weird nagging unease that he was "crying wolf" in the metaphoric grocery store 40 years ago, and that he continues to disrupt the peaceful goings-about of the busy pre-Christmas shoppers, eager to get home to meals with loved ones.