Freeze Frame

There's an expression I love, 'the things you see when you haven't got your gun' that, because of the ubiquity of smartphones, could now probably be amended to something like 'when you haven't got your Android/Pixel/IPhone' or whatever your cell phone with a camera.

Not that it would have done me any good the other day since, true to form, I'd left mine on the recharging shelf in the car; still haven't gotten used to having that and by the time I do, it will be time to turn the car in as the lease has expired (or I have). I was just popping into the grocer's for a minute so no big deal.

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), 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 and he'd eaten his way out.

Alongside Dad was Mom, pushing a stroller with a 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 remain silent.

The pair had been shopping, I guess, for most of their lives at Animal Skins R Us and I smiled thinking how big a frowny face the folks at PETA 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 'But wait, there's more.' 

On Mom's right shoulder, and she is as slender as the chance 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