Patience

We were in Display & Costume to look for, well, display options for an idea I had. Boy of Joy gave me his time to see what I wanted to and now it was his turn to poke and pry through bright tissue paper and party supplies. A store employee walked up to us. She was from the other end of the age spectrum from the gangly college kids D & C usually churns through. She was small and brown and rounded, everything from her age to the style of her hair and make-up to the lilts and pauses in her voice spoke of coming from whole worlds and cultures I will never know. She asked if she could help us; she asked it like reciting from a script. I-- with one eye constantly on my very small child to make sure he neither hurt nor was hurt by anything-- thanked her and joked that I only needed patience. And her eyes flashed at me. Yes, they did. Her eyes actually flashed at me. She moved in on me with an expression of absolute intense seriousness. "Patience costs nothing," she said, and she said it the way Captain American would drop a word about patriotism, the way a surgeon would stop an intern about to do something terribly wrong, the way a mother would step up to a teacher who'd given up on her child. "You close your eyes--" she closed her eyes. "You breathe--" she breathed. "You open your eyes and you see what you have to be grateful for--" she opened her eyes and looked and my child. "And-- patience!" "Patience costs nothing." And then she moved away, at her dignified slow pace, to find another customer whom she could help.