Maybe some of you can identify with this scenario that I witnessed recently. It happened in an office supply store. I was waiting next in line to take my turn with the check out cashier. First in line was a man with a shopping cart filled to capacity with large storage size plastic boxes. He had seven boxes in his cart. Four were pink and three were blue. An uneven number.

“Don’t you have one more blue box back there in your storage room?,” he asked the clerk in a pleading voice.

“I’m sorry sir, everything we have is here on the sales floor.”

The man looked over his shoulder at the check out line building up behind him. He sighed and then removed one of the pink boxes from his cart.

“I’ll just take these six then,” he said.

We all waited while the clerk totaled up his purchases. While we were waiting, I said to him,

“It’s probably good that they didn’t have anymore blue boxes. All the experts tell us we should all down-size.”

He turned to me and smiled wistfully and said,

“I know, I know, but when you have kids—. I have two, a boy and a girl. You have to keep the number of boxes equal. You can’t have favorites. My wife tries to keep all their stuff together in these boxes until she has time to go through them and throw out stuff. But somehow she never has time. I try to help but she says she can do it better by herself. My job now is just to keep buying more of these damn boxes. It seems sometimes like it will never end.”

Then he paid and left. I saw him a few minutes later in the parking lot trying to cram all the boxes into the trunk of his car.

Can any of you identify with this story? I thought so.

© 2008  by John Daly