Ken Berwitz
Apropos of nothing political….and nothing related to Marvin Lee Aday (AKA Meat Loaf) either….let me say that two out of three ain\’t bad.
What do I mean by this? I thought you\’d never ask.
My wife and I drove to CostCo this morning. We needed to fill the car with gas, I had a problem with the glasses I had bought there (not of their making) and we thought we\’d wander through the store to see if there was anything we needed.
Gas prices have finally (!!!!) come down to near where they ought to be, given the wholesale price of WTI oil and RBOB gasoline. As we drove up, the sign said $1.91 a gallon – the cheapest in the area.
But when we got to the pump they were changing it…..to $1.89.
Now this was not exactly a life changing difference. A 12 gallon fill, for example, would lower the total cost by less than a quarter. But there is a certain psychic value to having something drop in price just at the moment you are buying it that transcends the amount itself.
Anyway, it put me in a good humor. (my wife just shook her head when I told her as much….but, then again, that\’s no surprise; she shakes her head at a lot of what I say, think or do. And usually with good reason).
That\’s one.
Now we\’re in the store, with Barry, the guy I bought my glasses from. I explained to him that last week, while I was talking to our son, our sainted 8 and 5 year old grandchildren were trying to shoot a basketball through the very-much-lowered hoop he put up for them. One of their shots hit the rim, careened downward, and scored a direct hit on my face….eyeglasses first. I tried to unmangle them as best I could, but I\’m not very good this kind of stuff, and was also very afraid I would snap something and have no glasses at all. So could he take a look?
Barry not only straightened out the glasses, but was nice enough to replace a screw that was missing from my wife\’s glasses as well. He is a really good guy – pleasant, professional and accommodating – as are the other people we\’ve come across in that department. Add the fact that CostCo has the best prices for frames and lenses you can find anywhere near where we are, and you understand why we strongly recommend their services.
That\’s two.
Then we went through the store, and wound up with three items: Starbucks dark french roast coffee, which was on sale at, I think, $15.49 for 2 1/2 pounds ($6 a pound for Starbucks? How do you turn it down?), one of those “170 loads” containers of laundry detergent (which outweighed several of the people shopping there) and a bag of kale salad. Three items total.
We walked to the front of the store to check out. My wife, who was carrying the kale salad, stopped to look at something or other while I got what seemed to be the best line, where I asked the lady in front of me if I could put my items in her basket because they weighed so much, and she was nice enough to say yes. Then my wife showed up and stood with me, still holding the kale salad. So far, so good.
When it was time for the lady in front of me to put her items on the belt, she moved from directly behind her wagon to the left, where the customers are supposed to be. I was standing to her right, and when she moved I started to move that way too.
But the woman behind us pushed her cart so close that I could not get between them. I asked her to move back a little. She said no, that I had walked in front of her on line and it was her turn next.
Believe me, she wasn\’t there when I got on line. I admit I wear glasses, but my eyesight is at least proficient enough to see a hefty-sized woman and a cart loaded to the gills with whatever she was buying (from the looks of her, it might have been a serious depletion of the bakery department.)
The nearest we could figure is that she saw my wife come up with the kale salad, did not realize that I was already on the line with other stuff, and thought we were cutting in. But despite pointing out that I was already there, she again, this time somewhat angrily, told me that, no, I walked in front of her.
So rather than make an issue of it, I backed off and watched her triumphantly put $186 dollars worth of CostCo goods on the belt ahead of our three items.
Was I angry? I had a right to be, of course. But I was not. I decided it was just a blip on the radar of life, and not worth expending any bile over. Besides, I reasoned, God had punished her enough just by making her look the way she did. With that, I promptly put her in the rear view mirror of my memory…until now, that is, when I decided to break up the political commentary with some useless information about how my day went.
Besides, like I – and Meat Loaf – said, two out of three ain\’t bad.
OK, back to politics, where one out of a hundred is pretty much all you should ever hope for…and you often don\’t even get that much.
