Crisps, Crisps, Crisps!
Some moments are like snowflakes, as a human they’re fleeting, they dissolve as quick as you can feel them. As a writer sometimes, my hands feel too clumsy, too warm to hold the beauty of them long enough to trace their outline into a story before they melt. This morning Buddy and I had to stop on the way to school to buy crisp. I pulled over at a random off license in Tuebrook that we’d never been into before. I did that modern-day hunter-gatherer thing that we do when we stumble into an unfamiliar shop in a rush with a certain prize to find. “Crisps, crisps, crisps!” I was internally chanting in the temple of the get-the-kids-to-school gods. I was manifesting transformer snacks like a new age Rhonda Byrne fan. Wotsits were now my holy water to collect in the Lourdes of an off licence. “Crisps, crisps, crisps!” wailed the Neolithic voice in my gene memory, “find crisps or child will perish!” Then, I spotted them just above the serving hatch counter and asked Buddy to pick his fav.
Buddy picked himself a packet of barbecue Space Raiders, but when I came to pay at the counter I realised that I had no cash on me, I always try to carry cash for small businesses, but this time I had none, so I asked if I could pay with my phone. The shop keeper explained that the crisp were fifty pence and the minimum amount you could pay on card was a pound, so I just paid the guy a pound and said to Buds “Pick another packet mate”. He asked “What ones can I have Dad?” and I replied “Anything for fifty pence or under,” Buddy replied with a sweet “OK Dad.” He scanned the crisp for a few seconds, found another bag and asked if he could have them ones, I said yes, and he said “Thanks Dad”. But as he picked the second bag up, he put the first bag back. I explained to him ”No mate, you get two, I had to pay for two”. He looked up at me with these big unguarded eyes and said “Oh, I just thought we couldn’t afford them”. Such gravity. I stared at him for a minute and choked, I looked at the guy serving me, and he also had this massive pink smile all over his face, he looked teary happy. I could see he was caught in the same sentimental appreciation of Buddy’s affable grace. We had a glimmer. God, thinking back on it now, it was a reminiscent of my fav scene in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory where Charlie, despite all wishes for himself, gives back the never-ending gobstopper to Willy Wonker. Gene Wilder’s Shakespearian words forever tattooing onto my brain in that scene: “So shines a good deed in a weary world.” Lifting Willy Wonker from misanthropic to hopeful for people.
He does have a grace our Buds, an acceptance of all things. Maybe another kid would have protested at how unfair it was that he couldn’t get what he wanted. Maybe another kid wouldn’t appreciate the finite nature of finance. Maybe another kid might have felt embarrassed of himself or his dad, if he thought they couldn’t afford a bag of barbecue Space Raiders and might have ran out of the shop in shame. Buds moves through life with such grace that he inspires me to live better, to meet life in a better way. In the Poem ‘Sermons we see” by Edgar Guest, the poet writes:
‘I soon can learn to do it
If you let me see it done
I can watch your hands in action
But your tongue too fast may run
And the lecture you deliver
May be very wise and true
But I’d rather get my lessons
By observing what you do
For I might misunderstand you
And the high advice you give
But there’s no misunderstanding
How you act and how you live’
I feel lucky today, firstly lucky that we can comfortably afford crisps, secondly, lucky I have this great kid as a spiritual teacher, and thirdly, I feel lucky for snowflake moments. Those tiny fleeting moments that are gone in a flash but contain an infinity of humanness. I sometimes feel everything, feel too much, feel so much of the darkness that it cuts me. But to me, it’s worth knowing the cold to be able to see the snowflakes. I’m coming out of depression, I got my hopeful eyes back.
Ged Thompson