Cookies in the Airport

This evening our home teacher stopped by and gave us a lesson and some home baked cookies. He missed meeting with us on Sunday because of different things going on. So he shared this story with us. I loved it so much. That I am sharing it with you. I know that there have been so many times that I have only seen things "my way" and have not looked outside the box to see it from other people's eyes. I know that we can all learn from this story. Thankfully I learned from this. There area a lot of times that I tend to place blame on other people. I need to look at the bigger picture. I hope you enjoy this story. Or I dunno maybe this really happened.

Emma Lou Thayne’s
Cookies in the Airport

Cookies. Pepperidge Farm Milano. Just a few. Perfect for between flights. Buy a bag to put down with your belongings on the seat between you and the man also waiting down the row. Pick up your mystery novel, get absorbed, pass the forty-five minute layover with no anxieties.

Fine. But then … what? That man. What’s he doing? Reaching for your bag of cookies? Opening it? Taking a cookie out! Surely not. You look his way, try to be nonchalant, wonder what in the world…?

So you reach into the bag, take one yourself, looking intently at your book. Let him know just whose bag of cookies that is. But then… surely not again. He’s taking another cookie. Two! Eating them as if he’d done nothing wrong. The Nerve, the very nerve. And he looks like such a nice man, smiling the whole time, not at you, but at the newspaper he’s reading. Or pretending to. Like you with your book, now far from your focus but a great prop.

He reaches for the bag, takes two more cookies. You do the same. Neither looking at the other but seeing it all. Again him. Again you. Finally, the end. He reaches in, rustles his hand around in the bottom of the bag, and takes the last cookie! Oh come on! Do you accuse him? Give him a vampire look? Tip the empty bag over his face? Make him somehow aware? At least let him know that you know?

He’s standing up now, picking up his carry-on, and smiling. Smiling right at you, nodding as if he were the most pleasant man in the airport. Really? Not a word, not an apology?

You stand to gather your coat, your purse, your own carry-on. You fumble for your ticket as you head for the line-up to the flight. He’s now gone off to another gate. May his destination be jail!

You keep fumbling. Watching him go. Then… oh come on. Not really. In your purse, a bag of cookies. :)