“I brought it down hard, lord forgive me,” says the cashier at Walmart this morning. She is a woman probably in her early 40′s, but it’s hard to tell. She is pretty heavy, and wearing a brown wig that is slightly askew. She has all sorts of pink ribbon pins and other breast cancer awareness stickers and buttons attached all over her right side, which can’t help but draw attention to the fact that she has no right breast. This is emphasized by the presence of her rather massive left breast, unadorned by breast cancer awareness paraphenalia, but with a tiny Walmart logo embroidered on her blue shirt.
“He woke me in the middle of the night to tell me that we had a problem,’ she continues in her thick South Carolina drawl. “He can’t find his homework papers. Now I’m a god fearing woman who doesn’t expect much, but I don’t think I’ll be sent to hell if I demand that my child have half a brain and some responsibilities. Wakin his momma up at 10pm and telling me he can’t find his homework papers so that i have to get up and look for it? And lo and behold I find them in less than the time it took the lord to change water into wine.” At this point she has paused in her scanning of the few items I was buying, and is gesticulating at me with the hose splitter she had just scanned in.
“I brought the cane down on him from on high then, and when I was done, I ripped his homework in halves” says she, (for some reason ‘halves’ really sticks in my mind) “and I wrote a note to his teacher telling her that his homework got ripped up and thrown in the garbage and that she should send him home tonight with twice the homework as usual. Do you think I care what they think? I only care what the lord thinks. And well, he may think I’m being too harsh on the boy.” As she says this last part she seems to recall herself slightly, and finishes scanning my purchases.
“But what I want is for the boy to learn. I told my boy right then and there that if he didn’t start taking better care of his mind, then he’d never be a man to a wife or a father to a child. I told him the lord helps those who help himself.” She paused as I scanned my debit card and then she put the last of my items back in my cart.
“What I really think that school should do? What I really want? For him to repeat the fifth grade again. It’s the only way he’ll learn.”
Seeing this sitting at the top of my blog page I think to myself, “What kind of nut has a post like this on the top of their blog page?” I suppose I should post about… well, anything else at all to fix that, lol. This was an actual encounter I had though, was somewhat surreal. I’ve seen the woman.
Ooops, cut off my last comment too soon. I blame Kirk for distracting me.
I’ve seen the woman since, working away. She seems to wear less ‘decoration’ on her shirt than before, and I haven’t heard any new tirades.
Welcome to the South, I guess.