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Dear Jim,
I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your family and friends.
For some people, the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays evoke feelings and memories that are both positive and negative — these are seasons that bring up and bring out the best and the worst in us.
Let me share a recent incident I witnessed:
A woman and her two daughters hustle into one of our local supermarkets to buy food items for their Thanksgiving dinner.
The tired mother stands in the long checkout line, after navigating the aisles and repelling her daughters’ incessant appeals for candy, snacks, and sugary beverages.
While standing behind them in line, I heard one of her children complain. “Mommy!” one girl said for everyone to hear, “Why is it taking so long? I want to go home.”
“We are almost there, honey. Everyone is doing what we are doing.”
“What do you mean?” the daughter shot back.
“Well, look around. People are purchasing food and other things to prepare a Thanksgiving dinner for their families. So we need to be patient.”
Unconvinced, the other girl spoke up to support her sister, “Mommy, can we go to the car and wait? We are tired.”
The woman said nothing to them, only stared at them in a way that only mothers do. And the girls quit hassling their mother.
Finally, the woman empties her cart and, after scanning her purchases, the cashier announces, “That will be $187.55.”
Instead of flashing a credit card, the lady burrows into her pocketbook and pulls out an assortment of crumpled bills. She stops a moment, then searches deeper into her pocketbook, trying to find more cash.
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