What can I say about today?
It was crazy and busy and fraught with peril as I foolishly chose to wade into the murky waters of the shopping malls on the day before Christmas Eve. The worst part of it is, I still have more shopping to do tomorrow, and I forgot all about Christmas dinner, so I have to hit the grocery store too.
On the plus side, my sister bought me lunch today.
She bought lunch for all of us—me, Mom and my niece Crystal—not because she was being generous per se...of course it was generous...but because she was paying penance to the karma gods.
Why you ask? Well, it’s simple really. After a monster haul of shopping at one particular department store, she discovered that the clerk did not ring up half of her items. It was an apparent malfunction of the scanning device that went unnoticed in the mass pandemonium of Christmas shoppers. It wasn’t until my sister was checking her receipt that she discovered the error. And it was a big error in her favor.
She contemplated going back and letting the store know, but her fear was that the girl who checked her out would get into a lot of trouble. And then there were the lines and the wait just to go back. So as atonement for sins against chance, she offered to buy us all lunch.
Who would complain about that?
But she also figured she had used up her good fortune for at least the day, so she asked my niece to drive and requested that we all say a special prayer for her this evening. So this is my prayer to her…I’m sending her sins out there to all of cyberspace as a plea…what would you do if you discovered that you didn’t pay for half of your purchases after leaving the store? Would you go back…even if it meant the store clerk would be punished? Even if it meant you would spend a lot of time waiting in a line to see someone to fix the problem that you didn’t create?
I can’t say I have a good answer for that. I would have probably done the same thing she did.
My mom said it best though…she said, “if I had known the scarves were going to be free I would have had you get me one too!” I think I’ll worry more about her karma tonight.
Until the next time…I’ll be up with the chickens to find that last present!