Rain was coming down in buckets as I hunted for an empty space in the Kroger parking lot. At long last, I spotted an opening on the far north side of the lot, just down the hill from First Horizon Bank. As I turned to pull in, I saw the abandoned shopping buggy. It was straddling the line between two spaces, rendering them both unusable.
Naturally, I was not happy about this. I was irked. Miffed. Peeved. Upset. Annoyed. Irritated. Exasperated. I was close to being incensed, infuriated and completely livid. Get the picture?
I didn’t shove my gearshift into park and get out to move the buggy because there was way too much traffic around me. I’d be honked at for sure, even though I was doing a good deed, and might even suffer a fender bender. So I drove all the way to the far side of the gas island and lucked into a spot that had just been vacated. I was almost inside the store before my conscience got the best of me.
I’m able-bodied. I was wearing a hooded raincoat and carrying an umbrella. It wouldn’t hurt me one bit to go get that buggy and open up those two parking spaces. So that’s what I did.
But I fumed about it halfway through the store. I was almost sorry I hadn’t gone to the trouble of snapping a cell phone picture and posting it to social media, with a self-righteous caption that read “Why are people so lazy??? Why are people so selfish??? Why is it my job to put your buggy where it belongs???”
Sure, I realized there might be some good reasons. Maybe the buggy-pusher was handicapped. Maybe he or she used a cane or a walker or even a wheelchair to get around. Maybe the shopper wasn’t wearing a hooded raincoat or carrying an umbrella. Maybe it was a young mother with several little kids in tow. Maybe it was an elderly grandma with several little kids in tow. Maybe the person was late for a dentist appointment or a job interview or was experiencing a medical emergency. Maybe it was raining too hard to even see any of the numerous buggy corrals in the parking lot.
I knew that any of those things were possible. But I also knew it was just as possible that some slacker who didn’t want to bother putting the buggy in its proper place had left it where they finished with it.
The rain had moved out by the time I finished shopping. I pushed my buggy to the car and began rifling around in my purse for my keys. That’s when the car parked next to me caught my eye. It was an older-model Toyota that had seen better days. The tires were bald. Its paint was scratched and peeling in places and the rear end had more than a few dents. But it was the car’s front bumper that really grabbed my attention.
On it, nine perfect hearts had been stenciled and painted. The black half of the bumper was decorated with four silver hearts. The silver half was decorated with four black hearts. Where the two parts of the bumper met in the middle was a half-silver, half-black heart.
And that’s when the truth about human beings hit me smack-dab between the eyes. Some people are lazy. Some people are selfish. But other people paint beautiful hearts on the beat-up bumper of their beat-up Corolla. I slid my groceries into my trunk and found a pen and a piece of paper in a seat pocket. I drew a big heart. Inside it I wrote THANK YOU. YOUR FRONT BUMPER BRIGTENED MY DAY and slid the note under the Toyota’s windshield wiper.
And, yeah, I pushed my buggy to the corral before driving away.
(November 22, 2025)