JUST WHEN YOU THINK YOU'VE SEEN IT ALL
Payday was Thursday.
I hit a local bank downtown to withdraw some cash for some upcoming purchases I knew I'd be making.
Okay, okay. Perhaps "hit" isn't the most appropriate term to utilize in this particular circumstance.
Perhaps I should say that I swung by a local bank to withdraw cash.
At any rate, I took the "scenic route" home -- through a part of town that's, well, there's no other way to say it. It's seedy in parts, at best.
I was happily driving down the road, singing along to the radio, which was probably a bit too loud, when what unfolded before me caused me to swerve in the roadway, narrowly missing a parked car.
For what I saw explicitly explained my job more fully and caused me to say, out loud, "Are you freakin' kidding me?"
Coming at me, from the opposite direction, going at a pretty good clip, was a scruffy man on a bike. One hand held firmly to his handle bars, while his other hand was behind him, holding tightly to a metal grocery cart. The cart was occupied by two very young children, the youngest one just a bit past one, I'd say. He/she sat in the part of the grocery cart most grocery shopping folks put their children - - when they are in a grocery store ... not on a local street in and among speeding cars.
This little toddler was white-knuckling the handles of the cart while the world whizzed by him/her, all the while bobbing in the plastic-covered seat of the cart like a bobble-head, white-blonde hair flying this way and that in the considerable breeze being whipped up by the sheer speed of his/her father's pedaling. The man could have given Lance Armstrong a run for his money, I think.
The older sibling, possibly three or four, knelt in the back of the cart, also white-knuckling it, while the cart violently bumped and bounced on the pocked concrete road.
And suddenly it hit me! Some children can not overcome the educational hurdle because they've fallen victim to one of their parents' "brilliant ideas" and have suffered irreversible brain damage -- a sort of shaken baby syndrome at the hands of a rogue grocery cart.
I hit a local bank downtown to withdraw some cash for some upcoming purchases I knew I'd be making.
Okay, okay. Perhaps "hit" isn't the most appropriate term to utilize in this particular circumstance.
Perhaps I should say that I swung by a local bank to withdraw cash.
At any rate, I took the "scenic route" home -- through a part of town that's, well, there's no other way to say it. It's seedy in parts, at best.
I was happily driving down the road, singing along to the radio, which was probably a bit too loud, when what unfolded before me caused me to swerve in the roadway, narrowly missing a parked car.
For what I saw explicitly explained my job more fully and caused me to say, out loud, "Are you freakin' kidding me?"
Coming at me, from the opposite direction, going at a pretty good clip, was a scruffy man on a bike. One hand held firmly to his handle bars, while his other hand was behind him, holding tightly to a metal grocery cart. The cart was occupied by two very young children, the youngest one just a bit past one, I'd say. He/she sat in the part of the grocery cart most grocery shopping folks put their children - - when they are in a grocery store ... not on a local street in and among speeding cars.
This little toddler was white-knuckling the handles of the cart while the world whizzed by him/her, all the while bobbing in the plastic-covered seat of the cart like a bobble-head, white-blonde hair flying this way and that in the considerable breeze being whipped up by the sheer speed of his/her father's pedaling. The man could have given Lance Armstrong a run for his money, I think.
The older sibling, possibly three or four, knelt in the back of the cart, also white-knuckling it, while the cart violently bumped and bounced on the pocked concrete road.
And suddenly it hit me! Some children can not overcome the educational hurdle because they've fallen victim to one of their parents' "brilliant ideas" and have suffered irreversible brain damage -- a sort of shaken baby syndrome at the hands of a rogue grocery cart.
Comments