More People than even People Could Ever Imagine

There's an expression I love, 'the things you see when you haven't got your gun' that because of the ubiquity of smart phones could now probably be amended to something like 'when you haven't got your Android/Blackberry/IPhone' or whatever your cell phone with camera, but secretly a Swiss Army Knife and Particle Accelerator, is called. How many newscasts did you watch this week that had some one's camera phone video in the story? There you go.

Not that it would have done me any good the other day since, true to form, I'd left my wizard tool in the car because I intended to be but only a minute in the grocer's. And I wasn't too much longer than that coming out after finishing my errand and then ....

I spotted the toddler first-I think because I liked being a dad when our kids were young (I wasn't very good at it and I'm not claiming otherwise, okay? I'm just saying I liked it) so even today I scan the two feet from the ground first. And there he was. About three with a Mohawk dyed a shade of sunshine yellow so bright it hurt your eyes and because he wasn't visible enough from space yet, add alternating electric red stripes the length of the Mohawk. We're talking a thing of beauty.

He was notionally on the hand of his Dad who was pushing the shopping cart. I say it like that because he was jumping around like maybe a pallet of cane sugar had fallen on him in the store and he'd eaten his way out of the pile that threatened to bury him. Alongside of Dad was Mom, pushing a stroller with a little tiny person who (dad's perspective again) didn't look old enough to be sitting up in the first place. I chose to NOT say anything to the Mom, because I am a mellow fellow. That, and her husband being about six and half feet tall and no more than 1% body fat may have influenced my desire to be silent.

The pair had been shopping, I would guess, for most of their lives at Animal Skins R Us and Leather Forever and I smiled thinking how big a frownie face the folks at the new PETA website would have if they could see this pair.

But that's not the best part, and when I say best I mean not best.

Just below the shoulder blade on his left arm, and of course when you're styled and shaped like he is, it's a sleeveless shirt, he has a tattoo in jet black ink, "Her Stud." As the late Billy Mays used to say repeatedly 'but wait, there's more.' On Mom's right shoulder, and she is as slender as chances of pony rides on my birthday, in very much the same place in the darkest of tints, she has a tattoo with "His Bitch." Hopeless Romantics. And somewhere Norman Rockwell is suddenly not so sad he shuffled off his mortal coil at the moment he did.

-bill kenny