Saturday, April 25, 2009

Win or Lose

I just returned from some brief shopping at my local Dollar Store. (Good place to shop. I tore out the written-on pages from some old classroom notebooks from my former students, notebooks they abandoned on the last day of school, and sold them to Dollar Store, which in turn sells them as new.
What a racket.) Anyway, I was in the aisle when suddenly a 5- or 6-year-old boy kicked me in my shin. Wow, did that hurt! But I immediately thought about offering up my suffering, worth, I'd say, about 30 days deducted from my stay in purgatory. Wow, did I feel good. And some people say that purgatory is meaningless!

When I reached home, the little woman kicked me in my other shin for having bought the shower cleanser instead of the sink cleanser.

-Old Gargoyle

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"Offer it up" is one of my favorite Catholic school memories--it sounded much better from the teacher than, "I don't care about your problems so I'll attempt to baffle you with a dumb expression that will lead you to years of pointless pondering and eventually cause you to conclude that either the whole thing is a pile of horsewax, or you have some fundamental personal flaw that can never be corrected." This reader often has trouble peeling away the layers of the Gargoyle's thought, but he is eternally grateful to the Gargoyle for building up the layers so that they may be picked at. This reader is also grateful for the opportunity to write really long sentences in the third person, which strangely seem appropriate here more than in other places.

Rock on G!