I’ve submitted couple of stories over the years but this time, for the first time, it’s a good one.

One day, I was working the till as usual when a father came up with his daughter. The daughter was probably around 8 years old. I greeted them and started scanning, when the daughter approached me.

Daughter: Excuse me? My dad won’t let me have the gumball machine, can you say something to him?

(Said gumball machine was a small toy that we sold, no taller than 10cm.)

Surprised at how calm she was, I shook my finger at her dad and scolded him: “Bad dad.”

We all laughed and the two left without a problem.

The next day, the two were back, her jumping up and down. I greeted them and reached blindly for their items. When I turned my head, what else did I see but a small gumball machine.

Me: “Oh, you convinced him!”

And we all laughed again. The girl definitely made my day!

(A friend of mine comes over to hang out. For some background, I had a child at 18. While I wasn’t expecting to get pregnant, I was luckily in a good place to have my son. I’m also very pro-choice. My friend knows this. Our conversation turns to my pregnancy.)
Friend: Wait, you were only 18? Why didn’t you get an abortion?
Me: It wasn’t an option where I was, plus I was actually in a good place to have a kid, financially and emotionally.
Friend: Yeah, but you were barely an adult! You shouldn’t have a kid at that young.
Me: I’m not saying I planned it, but I also know I’ll likely have more health issues later down the road, and it would be better on my body to have a kid now than when I’m in my 30’s.
Friend: But….you were practically a kid!
(He refused to accept that an 18-year-old could make a decision like that. We’re no longer friends.)

My husband and I are massive chopbusters and a lot sarcastic with each other. For an example… I am the author of this story: https://notalwaysright.com/an-eye-opening-relationship/46524/

The other night, he was being really obnoxious for mostly no reason other than to amuse himself. I was laying in my recliner and didn’t feel like getting up when he moved out of reach, so we end up having this conversation:

Me: “Can you come here please?”
Him: “Nope. I am happy right where I am.”
Me: “But I would be happier if you were here.”
Him: “I wouldn’t”
Me: “Why not?”
Him: “Because I would be in pain.”
Me: (in my most innocent voice): “Awww, why do you think you would be in pain?”
Him: “Are you kidding? I have ears. I hear the things that comes out of my mouth.”

And this is how he manages to stay alive. Because he cracks me up so much that I forget to be mad at him.

One day, I was waiting at a bus stop outside of a local grocery store. I was wearing my full work uniform (a company vest with a name tag, a nice button-up shirt, and black pants) and idly chatting with another person at the bus stop. A stranger approaches me and quietly asks me a question.

Stranger: Hey, time for…?

He then makes a hand gesture that I don’t recognize at first.

Me (oblivious): Oh, the time is 12:45.

Stranger: No…

He makes the hand gesture again and pulls out a small plastic tube. In that small plastic tube is a dose (or several doses) of black tar heroin. I now recognized that hand gesture: it was one that drug dealers commonly used to subtly advertise their product.

Me: Uh…no, not interested.

And at that point, the stranger walked away. The weirdest part? It wasn’t 12:45 in the morning. It was 12:45 in the afternoon. This guy tried to do a drug deal in broad daylight.

(When I was a teenager going to high school, I tended to skip lunch. There wasn’t any real ‘reason’ to it, I just didn’t really bother with packing myself a lunch, and other than a single vending machine there were no on-campus options for food even if I did feel like paying for it. So, my mom would pack me a lunch. It wasn’t anything fancy; half a pita filled with hummus and lettuce, with a granola bar on the side.

And, while I didn’t want to be picky about my no-effort lunch, I did at one point request a single change; that she avoid putting big, hard lettuce spines in my pitas. Because after half a day of the pita soaking in all that hummus moisture it was pretty fragile, so if there was a hard lettuce spine in there, a single bite would cause the pita to lose all structural integrity and the entire thing would just kind of explode in my hands.

So I asked her once to not put spines in my pita, and she stopped putting spines in my pita.

Fast forward fen years.

I’ve just gotten to my mom’s house after a long day of travelling, and she serves me dinner; soup and a salad. I very gratefully down the soup, but when I get to the salad… I end up having to use my fork more as a scoop than anything else, because it’s all super-thin lettuce leaves that my fork can’t get a grip on. So, when asked how I liked the salad…)

Me: “It’s good, but… there’s no spines for my fork to bite into…”

Mom: “But I thought you didn’t like the spines?”

Me: “I don’t dislike the spines, I just didn’t like my pita splitting open because of them.”

(My mom then got an expression of epiphany, while I had my own. The salad I had just eaten? It didn’t have any spines because my mom had gone through the bowl and taken them all out. She had literally *hand-picked* each and every single leaf of that salad just for me.

If that’s not love, I don’t know what is.)