Karma is a bitch.
E.g.,
Snow Day at Shady Glen! Not a real snow day, mind you, this being Southern California, where it’s 80 degrees in December, but a Snow Day Shady Glen style. This means tons of shaved ice trucked into Shady Glen’s park first thing in the morning, piled into a hill by a crew of day laborers, then smoothed out by a sledding expert to create a nifty sled run for the kids. Add in a coffee cart for the adults and you’ve got yourself a day full of fun.
All that’s asked of you is to bring an unwrapped new toy, worth about $20, for the Fire Department’s toys-for-tots campaign. At the end of Snow Day the firemen show up in a hook-and-ladder, give the kids a tour, let them sit behind the wheel, that sort of thing, and then load it up with the toys and head off to spread the Holiday cheer to those kids whose parents cannot afford to truck tons of fake snow into their communities.
So there I was, working the toy table at the entrance like the good Shady Glen citizen I was, when she showed up with three kids in tow. And no toys. I’d been there for two hours, collecting toys from maybe 100 people, and she was the first to arrive without a toy. Most brought one for each kid, some brought even more, considering it was such a good cause and all, but she had none.
Sometimes time slows down, seconds crawl by, perception tingles and you notice every little thing. Something like that happened to me then. Her eyes hit on me, then darted down to the table, strewn with new toys, then over to the poster informing entrants of the new toy entrance requirement, then back to me, my mouth starting to form the question “Do you have a toy?,” but before I could get to the “have” she turned away, put her head down, grabbed her nearest kid and barreled past me, pretending not to hear me as I finished my sentence.
Standing there, my sentence finished but now discarded on the ground, I watched her back recede from me. What to do? Only one thing. I abandoned my post and ran after her.
She had made it to a group of women when I caught up to her. I sidled into their circle, turned to her, and repeated: “Do you have a toy?” This time she glared at me, didn’t look away, and said she hadn’t, that she’d been very busy, what with being a working mother and all, and she was sorry but no, she hadn’t brought one, she said as she turned away and started to walk away, continuing her retreat.
Visions of underprivileged children danced through my head. Visions of the many working mothers who’d managed to find the time to buy a toy for these underprivileged children also danced through my head. So I called out, loudly, to her rapidly receding back: “Everyone else is busy but no one else is stiffing the poor kids!”
That got her attention. And others’ as well. Faces turned to me, hers included. She reached into her purse, pulled out a $20 dollar bill, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at me. As it sailed through the air she yelled out “Fuck you!” and continued walking away. The $20 fell short. I left it there and returned to my table, now deprived of whatever good cheer I’d accumulated that morning and questioning whether I was wrong to confront her like that.
Then, in quick succession, the following happened:
Her business failed. She designed items for the rooms of fashionable children (irony of ironies!). It turns out she sourced some of her raw materials from China, and said raw materials were so soaked in formaldehyde that they gave off noxious fumes, hardly the sort of thing one wants a fashionable child to breathe in his or her room. So when news of this broke her business broke leaving her broke.
That meant the house had to go. She had just finished constructing a mega-mansion that must’ve cost many millions. She’d designed it herself, heedless of others’ advice, she being the expert, after all, on rooms for fashionable children and therefore, by close extrapolation, rooms for fashionable people. As far as I know, the house wasn’t soaked in formaldehyde, but some of her ideas were nearly as toxic, such as the dormitory-style kids’ room for her three tots in its own isolated second-floor wing, the stage with seating for 30 in case the kids every wanted to put on a play, and a slide from the kids’ wing down to the first floor that wasn’t completely enclosed and therefore conjured up visions in most people of kids spilling over the edge to their deaths. Hardly the sort of vision one wants when one contemplates buying a mega-mansion with a multi-million price tag. So her house just sat on the market, unsold, and as overall house prices plunged hers plunged faster.
Around this time the husband left. I never knew what he did, other than look like a male model and drive the kids around, but whatever he did he started doing it without her.
And then her youngest kid got cancer. Was it the formaldehyde? People wondered.
And at that point even I could no longer derive pleasure from her karmic misfortunes. Yet when she organized a fundraiser to help pay for her kid’s cancer treatment, I initially considered attending, if only I could throw my money at her, but in the end I refused to go and, in so doing, I let her kid down.
Karma is, indeed, a bitch, and when I reflect on this, and all the other valid reasons karma could cite for making my own life a living hell, I shudder.
All that’s asked of you is to bring an unwrapped new toy, worth about $20, for the Fire Department’s toys-for-tots campaign. At the end of Snow Day the firemen show up in a hook-and-ladder, give the kids a tour, let them sit behind the wheel, that sort of thing, and then load it up with the toys and head off to spread the Holiday cheer to those kids whose parents cannot afford to truck tons of fake snow into their communities.
So there I was, working the toy table at the entrance like the good Shady Glen citizen I was, when she showed up with three kids in tow. And no toys. I’d been there for two hours, collecting toys from maybe 100 people, and she was the first to arrive without a toy. Most brought one for each kid, some brought even more, considering it was such a good cause and all, but she had none.
Sometimes time slows down, seconds crawl by, perception tingles and you notice every little thing. Something like that happened to me then. Her eyes hit on me, then darted down to the table, strewn with new toys, then over to the poster informing entrants of the new toy entrance requirement, then back to me, my mouth starting to form the question “Do you have a toy?,” but before I could get to the “have” she turned away, put her head down, grabbed her nearest kid and barreled past me, pretending not to hear me as I finished my sentence.
Standing there, my sentence finished but now discarded on the ground, I watched her back recede from me. What to do? Only one thing. I abandoned my post and ran after her.
She had made it to a group of women when I caught up to her. I sidled into their circle, turned to her, and repeated: “Do you have a toy?” This time she glared at me, didn’t look away, and said she hadn’t, that she’d been very busy, what with being a working mother and all, and she was sorry but no, she hadn’t brought one, she said as she turned away and started to walk away, continuing her retreat.
Visions of underprivileged children danced through my head. Visions of the many working mothers who’d managed to find the time to buy a toy for these underprivileged children also danced through my head. So I called out, loudly, to her rapidly receding back: “Everyone else is busy but no one else is stiffing the poor kids!”
That got her attention. And others’ as well. Faces turned to me, hers included. She reached into her purse, pulled out a $20 dollar bill, crumpled it into a ball, and threw it at me. As it sailed through the air she yelled out “Fuck you!” and continued walking away. The $20 fell short. I left it there and returned to my table, now deprived of whatever good cheer I’d accumulated that morning and questioning whether I was wrong to confront her like that.
Then, in quick succession, the following happened:
Her business failed. She designed items for the rooms of fashionable children (irony of ironies!). It turns out she sourced some of her raw materials from China, and said raw materials were so soaked in formaldehyde that they gave off noxious fumes, hardly the sort of thing one wants a fashionable child to breathe in his or her room. So when news of this broke her business broke leaving her broke.
That meant the house had to go. She had just finished constructing a mega-mansion that must’ve cost many millions. She’d designed it herself, heedless of others’ advice, she being the expert, after all, on rooms for fashionable children and therefore, by close extrapolation, rooms for fashionable people. As far as I know, the house wasn’t soaked in formaldehyde, but some of her ideas were nearly as toxic, such as the dormitory-style kids’ room for her three tots in its own isolated second-floor wing, the stage with seating for 30 in case the kids every wanted to put on a play, and a slide from the kids’ wing down to the first floor that wasn’t completely enclosed and therefore conjured up visions in most people of kids spilling over the edge to their deaths. Hardly the sort of vision one wants when one contemplates buying a mega-mansion with a multi-million price tag. So her house just sat on the market, unsold, and as overall house prices plunged hers plunged faster.
Around this time the husband left. I never knew what he did, other than look like a male model and drive the kids around, but whatever he did he started doing it without her.
And then her youngest kid got cancer. Was it the formaldehyde? People wondered.
And at that point even I could no longer derive pleasure from her karmic misfortunes. Yet when she organized a fundraiser to help pay for her kid’s cancer treatment, I initially considered attending, if only I could throw my money at her, but in the end I refused to go and, in so doing, I let her kid down.
Karma is, indeed, a bitch, and when I reflect on this, and all the other valid reasons karma could cite for making my own life a living hell, I shudder.
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