A Christmas Miracle
About two days before Christmas, I stopped at the local supermarket to pick up some drinks. It was lightly snowing, and I was in a great mood walking through the parking lot. I had no work for a couple of days and no big family event that year; just a few days to relax and unwind. The parking lot was packed, and I had to park about as far away as possible to get a space.
I was approaching the front of the store when I saw an old woman in a giant barge of a Cadillac making a long, slow turn into the parking lot lane like she was navigating a Sherman tank through an alleyway. She was preparing to turn into one of the handicapped spaces when a black Escalade whipped into it almost out of thin air. Out stepped a middle-aged man who was clearly not disabled.
The old woman came to a crawl as she passed by, and for reasons I’ll never know, I knocked on her window and said, “Hang on a sec, I’ll ask this guy to move”. I jogged over to him and said, “Hey, do you think you could move your car? I think this lady really needs that space”. Well, you’d have thought I just asked the guy for a kidney or a home loan with the look he gave me. He was absolutely fuming.
He pointed to the license plate on his SUV and said, “Those are handicapped plates, buddy. I can park there if I want to”. I motioned to the lady to wait just another minute. I got really close to the guy and said as menacingly as I could manage: “You’re going to move that car, or when you go into that store, I’m gonna hop in my Sentra and smash into it until it looks like something out of Mad Max”.
I don’t think he knew what I meant, but a constipated look crossed his face, and then he rolled his eyes. “Calm down. I’ll move the car. Merry Christmas”. I replied, “You too, buddy”. I ran into the lady inside the store, and she repeatedly offered to pay for my stuff. She wouldn’t take no for an answer, and as we walked out, she asked for my address.
A few days later, I got a very nice Christmas card from her and her husband, who was a disabled veteran. He wrote almost two pages of thanks and how incidents like this made him hopeful for the future. I don’t consider myself a brave person, but I can’t deny that the whole event made me feel pretty cool, even if it was rather mundane.