When I was a little boy, I experienced something that I have never forgotten yet rarely talk about. It has impacted me my whole life.
I was about 5 years old and in kindergarten. The day's classes had ended and the final bell had rung. A group of us had dwindled down to just a couple when I saw my mom pull up to get me. I jumped in the car and chatted with mom as she drove to the local grocery store to get things to make dinner. The entire shopping trip was completely unremarkable just like they always were. (Aside from that one time when I got lost and cried my eyes out thinking I was never going to see my mom again.)
Mom was at the check out register and the girl that worked there was ringing things up as quickly as she could. My eyes could barely see her over the moving conveyor belt but I watched intently as she looked at the price tags and entered them one clanky digit at a time into her huge and loud calculator machine. It kept my attention much longer than usual but those 5 seconds were like an eternity for this kid. Mom kept pulling my hand swinging me around her back and forth telling me to stay still and wait. I knew the words she was saying but my brain hadn't fully connected to my legs yet so I proceeded to walk to the front of the store to find a machine that I could play with just like our cashier was doing. My target? The Dr. Pepper vending machine!
I think it was about a mile from where my mom was to the vending machine. It could also have been about 10 feet but I wasn't sure. I just knew that even though it was far away my mom had her eyes locked on me. Every time I looked at her she was already looking at me. I never figured out how she was able to do that. Her gaze made me feel I was okay and since she wasn't yelling or scowling I figured I must've reached a new maturity milestone that day.
I turned around and pressed the buttons on the Dr. Pepper machine and walked back to my mom to make sure she wasn't going to yell at me. I waited while the cashier rang up a package of ground beef another single clankity digit at a time. I walked back to the Dr. Pepper machine as if to show off what a big boy I was and pressed the plastic rectangle buttons on the machine again but in a different order. I proceeded to bounce back and forth between what felt like watching paint stay wet at the cash register and acting like GI Joe sending messages by morse code when pressing the buttons on the vending machine. I created a relay event of walking to my mom, listening to the clanky numbers and then walking to the vending machine to press the clanky buttons. I must've done this for somewhere between a 100 years or maybe like 2 minutes while waiting for the register to make that final really long "chick, chick, chicketychick, chick" sound when it finally spits out the total.
The last time that I pressed the buttons on the soda machine something miraculous happened. Something that left me absolutely stunned and frozen. I'll never forget it: I pressed the button on the machine and without any chorus of angels any without any beams of sunlight, a Dr. Pepper came out! My little brain knew how these things work but something was amiss. "You're supposed to put a big coin and a little coin in there to make it give you stuff; What is happening?" I wondered. This was weird. Was the rest of my world going to collapse in on me too? I opened the slot to remove the Dr. Pepper and verify that it was real. I know that my smile gave away everything. I felt like a pirate that just found his treasure. As I turned around and carried what must've been a whole keg of Dr. Pepper in my little hands, I saw an old Mexican man who was waiting for his own cashier to finish evolving and ringing up his items. He caught my attention for some reason. As I looked at him and carried this vessel of Dr. Pepper he smiled and gave a little wave. Even though I was zapped of my energy from being such a big boy, I waved back. I looked at my mom and she feigned surprise at how I got this magically incredible and awesome tanker of Dr. Pepper. I was suspicious and only told her what she needed to know. Even though I never saw her and that old man clandestinely planning anything, I think she had been in on the ruse. She was the best double agent and mom around, you know!
When we got home I excitedly told my dad what had happened with all the clarity and brevity of the guy downtown explaining the Bible to a grasshopper. I don't remember everything my dad said but I do remember how his blue eyes would get smaller and smaller the more he smiled and laughed as we talked about the magic machine that commanded my story.
It's going on 50 years since that moment in the grocery store and I still think about that old man. Only now, I think about life through his eyes. How it must've made his heart grow watching a child beam with surprise and happiness. How he must've moved like a superhero to put change in the machine before I returned to it. I think about whether he realized that something so simple and so transient could've made such an impact. I wonder if his own children got to see the joy in his face. I wonder if he even had children or if he was alone and lived vicariously as a parent as I do. I don't know if there's a moral to this story but I do know that children think and feel way more than many think they do. I still find myself smiling when I use a vending machine to get a Dr. Pepper. I like to think that old man still smiles when this child gets one too.