The other day I was dashing through the aisles of the grocery store desperately trying to find peanut-free, gluten-free, dairy-free, yet highly nutritional individually wrapped snacks, which tasted good enough that the kids in my daughter’s first grade class would actually eat them.
I narrowed my search to the Fruit Roll-Up/Gushers/Fruit by the Foot aisle and stood alongside a little boy who was busily scaling shelves. His parents were no where in sight. After five minuets of watching the kid scatter fruit snack boxes around like they were mini cardboard blocks I softly asked him if he knew where his mother went.
He couldn’t have been more than four years old, so when my query was met with a smirk instead of an “Oh, she’s in the taco shell aisle,” I wasn’t the least bit surprised. I looked up and down the aisle once again and even walked up to the end cap to see if there were any panic-stricken parents running around the store frantically looking for their child.
No dice.
I walked back to the kid and suggested that we “go find mommy.” My plan was to walk him to the customer service counter and hopefully run into his parents along the way.
No dice.
I didn’t even get two feet with the kid when he started to scream, “MOOOOOOOOM!!!!” at the top of his lungs.
I was kind of hoping his tactic would produce his anxious parents.
No dice.
Instead, to my amazement, not a single soul in the entire mega-store blinked an eye as they observed the ruckus. After a while I figured out that people thought the kid was mine.
I am not kidding; this boy screamed for his mom for at least five minutes.
How can you possibly listen to a kid yell for 300 solid seconds and not render aid?
I didn’t want to grab the boy, so I started walking to one of those store courtesy phones. Just as I was about to pick up the receiver I spot a girl about eight years old come barreling around the corner, yank the kid’s arm, and drag him to down to produce section.
Well, I thought, at least his family didn’t drive off without him.
The quasi-lost kid incident put a serious dent into my already limited shopping time, so I booked it to the front registers as fast as I could. Just as I was rounding the corner with my shopping cart I see the boy, the girl who retrieved him from the fruit snack aisle, a toddler and a man pushing a cart with an infant inside.
I barely had time to process the entire scene when the man looked me dead in the eye and uttered these 12 words to me: “Feel free to run them over. They are a bunch of pains.”
I was speechless.
The man wasn’t.
Instead, he prodded me again: “Really, run them over. They deserve it.”
“Dad!” cried the girl. “Nooooooooo!”
In the moment, all I could think to do was push my cart… far, far away.
That was three days ago and I still can’t get believe what I saw and heard.
So, was the dad a reluctant parent or was he just having a bad day with a cart full of kids?
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