I Am Young!

I don't know if people feel that I am the youngest, but I have often found myself in situations where I had to prove that I am legally and adult.

A long pause from such occurences led me to the (wrong) conclusion that, okay, now I'm a grown-up, I have wrinkles, thus I no longer need to prove this.

Murphy and his laws are always with us! In only one evening, I had two such moments, less than half an hour apart.

 

The first occurence

I went into a grocery store because some peaches caught my eye. I put a few in a bag and went to the checkout. From somewhere to my right, I heard a woman's voice.

"Give it here, mama’s girl!"

Obediently, I handed her the bag, she weighed it, told me how much it cost, and I handed her the money.

"Please don't be angry with me! But until I heard your voice, I thought you were one of those kids who come here from school on their way to home. "

"Don't worry," I laugh happily, "it's no problem."

"You say that, but there have been people who got really angry and spoke to me so rudely!"

"Well, there are much worse things in life than people thinking you're younger than you are," and I smile gratefully at her for sharing this with me.

I leave the grocery store with a big smile on my face; I may not be that tall, but I am young.

Incident two

I walk into an Arabic butcher's shop to buy some tea, of course. I quickly choose a box and the man behind the counter tells me to take a meatball.

"No, thank you!"

"Come on, take it!"

"I don't want it."

"Why don't you want it?"

"Because I don't want it!" I reply cheekily.

"That’s no excuse, you have to take it."

I realize that the man is insisting out of kindness or a sense of trading, so I give in, seeing him standing there for a while with his hand outstretched toward me, holding the tray. I take a meatball.

"You’ll eat it, yes!"

"Yes, I'll eat it, I promise."

"That's good, that's very good. You take care of yourself, okay?!"

I leave laughing and sink my teeth into the meatball. It's so good that I almost want to go back and apologize for being ungrateful and thank him for insisting that I eat something so delicious. But I'll make it up to him someday. For now, I'm enjoying the kindness of strangers, which also goes through the stomach and rises high, high, very high, where the smoke of our thoughts sometimes clouds our perception of the beautiful things around us, and it, the kindness, dear kindness, helps brighten up the things.