Wink

There I was walking around Trader Joe's in what-felt-like a drunken stupor. 

Only I wasn't drunk.

I had just gone for walk at a nearby recreational field and this walk was for a half a mile or so, as part of my post-Lyme disease "physical therapy". About a half a mile walk was my limit and I had apparently pushed the envelope a little too far.

What results from pushing the envelope is this drunk feeling. I don't know what it is. Toxins are usually eliminated during exercise, so maybe my liver's unable to keep up with the workload. Instead of being excreted from my body, the toxins enter my bloodstream. And go up to my brain. And then I feel drunk as a skunk.

The store was a kind of blur and I couldn't help but wonder if people were looking at me funny. Did I look drunk? Was I stumbling? Because I felt like I was walking at a sideways 45-degree angle. Some of the hipster employees were looking at me weird. Did they notice something was off?

My objective was to get a frozen pizza. I was supposed to be eating gluten-free but I had recently determined that eating 100-percent gluten-free was making me very irritable for whatever reason. Searching online, I read that the irritability could be due to candida die-off, which is what occurs when you stop eating wheat. Either way, I figured it was ok to pump the brakes on all this gluten-free business. Besides, the pizza was organic. Close enough.

It took me a little while to find the section where the frozen pizza was. The longer it took me, the longer I had to walk around the store like a village drunkard. And the longer I walked around the store, the more boozy I felt.

I eventually found the blurry box of pizza and proceeded to the checkout. "Ok," I said to myself, "Now you must go to a cashier and hand her money and then you leave the store." Yes, I had to tell myself all this because confusion comes along with the drunk feeling. "I repeat: locate the cashier, say 'hello how are you', hand her cash, take whatever change, and then get the hell out of there, man."

I managed to successfully find the cashier and start paying for the pizza, but not without realizing how ridiculous this all was. "I can't even walk a fregging half a mile without feeling like this afterwards? How depressing. I still have a loooooooooong recovery ahead of me. This blows! Shit!"

It was a low point, maybe even rock bottom, or maybe I'm being a tad dramatic. But that was when I saw a man come around from the register behind me. Maybe in his 50s or so. Looked a little nerdy. Kind of like the sort you would see working at a used record store. Longish hair, about lower-neck length. Eyeglasses. And a mustache. But not an ironic one. 

He looked at my purchase, the pizza, and said...

"But I thought you would go get sushi...and not pay!"

At first, I thought to myself, "Here we go again." Over the years, I had come to accept that I was, for whatever reason, a weirdo-magnet. I don't know if it's my blood-type or what, but I have been known to attract weirdos wherever I go. They sniff me out. They must sense my compassion. They know I'll be nice to them.

But then his words sunk into my cortex and I realized...

Oh, he saw my shirt!

Yes, I had been wearing a very faded Repo Man shirt. Repo Man, if you don't know (most people don't) is a great 1984 cult film starring Emilio Estevez and the late Harry Dean Stanton. Let's go get sushi and not pay is one of the great lines from the movie!




I smiled at the man and pointed at him in "good one" fashion. "That was good," I said to him. "That was really good."

And, boy it WAS good. Like, wicked good. So sharp and witty and quick. Holy crap, it was just so perfect. I never would have come up with something like that so on-the-spot. How long did it take him to think of that?

I laughed the whole way home from Trader Joe's. I couldn't stop giggling my ass off.

That was the first time my Repo Man shirt had ever been commented on in public. And I don't think the timing was coincidental, either. Earlier that very day, I had noticed that my mom was reading a book called When God Winks by Squire D. Rushnell. This is a book that talks about how coincidences are God's way of "winking" at you, letting you know you're not alone so stop your worrying and keep the faith.

What I'm getting at is that I think the used-record-store-looking guy crossed paths with me at just the right, divine time, when I was feeling so low. He lightened the load, brightened my mood, got me laughing when I needed laughter the most. 

Yes, that man was God's messenger angel that day. He probably didn't even know it but he was God's wink for me. 

Maybe I'll be God's wink for somebody in the future, unknowingly delivering a message or a sign to them that they need oh-so-badly. Or maybe I've already been a wink for somebody in the past. And I didn't even know it...

Maybe we've ALL been winks at some point in our lives. Or perhaps we're constantly being used as winks, on a daily basis. It's kind of like we're being moved around like chess pieces, to wink at each other all the time on the great chess board of life.

Who knows: I may have been God's wink for the girl I bought ice coffee from last night.

Or the guy whose status I commented on, just a little while ago.

Or maybe...just maybe...I'm winking at YOU right now.

Wink.