Last night I got held up while waiting at a bus stop
So, true story kids:
Yesterday evening I was at a bus stop waiting for the bus (no surprise there) when three teenagers and a knife show up. "We just want your cash!" they say, pointedly. Such terrible profiling. I'm hardly the go-to guy when it comes to cash. I hand over my wallet and mention with sympathetic dismay: "I think there's only 10 bucks in there..." He takes out the cash and hands back the wallet. A simple public transaction, you might say. He counts the bills: there's $6. He blinks. I shrug.
Plan B mode: "Give me your cellphone!!!!" Humor, you toy with us! This adolescent delinquent joins the sorry few who realize just how rinky-dinky my cellphone is. In another life, it was a hammer. Imagine a phone that feels sorry for itself, daily apologizing for existing. That's my phone. Handing it to him was like passing a broken, quenched torch. He looks at it and is overcome with discouragement. The same way I felt when I bought it. We all give a sad sigh. It wasn't being a good night for any of us.
Reluctantly, they run across the street, past the shopping mall and disappear into the night. The two ladies at the bus stop sit in silence, frozen, staring at me, wondering what I'll do next. Indeed, what I do next wasn't easy. But I push myself to do it. I muster all the goodness within me and in my mind call out: "I FORGIVE YOU CELLPHONE, you dastardly excuse of a communication apparatus. Take my forgiveness with you and be whole!"
And just like that: all the bitterness I had been harboring for the past four months simply melts away. T'was a night of reconciliation, of forgiveness, of a poor boy being robbed at knife-point and somehow coming away richer.
Nothing else happened that night except everything else that happened.
Oh, and did I mention: packed snugly away in my backpack, secure and at ease, rested an Alienware laptop and an iPad.
