about a week ago dad and gabby had a fun day out. we ate pizza at a kids place in town. gabby played games and got prizes. one of those prizes was a yellow balloon - i suppose prize is the wrong word for it because i paid $1.25 for it - anyway...
after lunch we went to the store on base (the BX) to look for a new pair of tennis shoes. then we went to eat ice cream. it was a happy fun kinda day until... we realized that we left the yellow balloon in the store, presumably in the shoe department. so after ice cream we went to the store to recover our lost yellow balloon.
as we turned the corner to go upstairs to the shoe department we saw a man with a boy with (you guessed it!) a yellow balloon. so i asked the guy whether the balloon belonged to the boy or if they found it in the store because my little girl left her balloon upstairs. the guy replied (in a german accent*), “no no it’s his”. disappointed, we continued our search upstairs. as we walked up the stairs gabby kept saying, “that boy has my yellow balloon”. and i couldn’t help but think that either they’re giving away yellow balloons in the store or that guy was lying.
we looked around upstairs and of course there was no yellow balloon to be found. and there we were, gabby going on and on about how that boy has her yellow balloon and me stewing over the nerve of that jerk to basically steal a balloon from a 3-year old little girl. after a minute of planning we went back downstairs on a mission to get back our yellow balloon from that kid and his scheming dad.
we finally tracked him down on the other side of the store and i questioned the guy about where his boy got his yellow balloon. caught without an alibi, they guy admitted that they found it in the store. after, more forcefully this time, explaining to him that this yellow balloon belonged to my little girl, the guy relented and graciously offered to return it.
at the end of the day, we walked away happy with some left-over pizza in a box, a little ice cream on our faces and our yellow balloon.
*you may wonder why it’s important to the story that the guy was german. well when we moved here a guy explained that many germans have this passive-aggressive mindset where the guy who speaks the loudest or insists usually gets what he wants. apparently there’s a german word for it but i can’t remember what it is. anyway, i’ve seen this in action many times, usually on the road but never toward a 3-year old little girl.
No comments:
Post a Comment