@#$%^ ONE THING!

Less than ten minutes' walk from my place is a sprawl of establishments that includes a bookstore, a department store, three drugstores, two groceries, a coffee place, and various restaurants and small businesses. After work today, I went to this place to buy some necessities for the house. As is the case for an old, forgetful, and stressed-out guy like me, I forgot to purchase ONE THING. What this ONE THING is isn't important to this post, but I can tell you that as I unlocked the front gate and set foot onto my property, it struck me that I had forgotten to buy it. Under my breath I muttered some colourful words guaranteed to put me on the "Naughty/Not Nice/Downright Evil" list of the fat guy in the red suit.

I dropped my bags and packages onto the living room coffee table--dismally thinking of the crowds, the long lines at the cashiers, the traffic's exhaust fumes, and worst of all, the piped-in Christmas carols--and trudged back, grumbling all the way.

Finding the #$%^@! ONE THING was not too difficult, but finding a way to pay for it was. People were as thick as flies and maggots on a corpse, and frankly, I was feeling pretty corpse-like by this time; I was dead tired. Murphy's Law came into effect when I chose the shortest queue, which of course, ended up to also be the slowest. Home, home! I wanted to pay for my item and get HOME!

When I finally reached the head of the line, I paid for that ONE THING and made haste to leave. In all that hustling bustle (bustling hustle?), just before I made my escape, I spied two kids sitting Indian-style on the floor, their backs to some magazine shelves. They looked to be sisters, about 12 and 10, I estimated. They had open books propped on their laps, and had shut out the world. To read.

Hey, hey, hey! Cool beans! I couldn't see the titles of their books, but they seemed to be the same size as those published by Adarna House.

Kids. Reading.

Ha. Ha! HA!

Even if the return trip to the store to get that ONE THING was anything but pleasant, the walk home was much lighter, then.