I’ve come to accept that I live a strange life. Mom says it’s God’s way of making sure I never run out of column material. 

I offer the following as case in point. 

Last week, I was skimming the online postings on Craigslist when I saw a post from someone looking for baskets. The post seemed heaven-sent. My latest attempt at organization had (as usual) resulted in little more than stuff being relocated from one part of the house to another. But this time, when the dust from my round-up had settled, I found a once-scattered assortment of baskets had been corralled together. 

We needed space. They needed to go. And here, thanks to the posting, was my simple solution. 

I sent an email to the woman who placed the ad, offering to give her the baskets, and we emailed back and forth several times to figure out where to meet. She’d only recently moved to Charleston from Ohio and wasn’t familiar with too many places, but we finally settled on one we could both find-the Moose Lodge parking lot just past Daniel Boone Park. Since we got off work at the same time, we agreed to head to the lot immediately after work.

She described her car (an older model blue) and said she had a bunch of Mardi Gras beads hanging from her rearview mirror. And since she’d said she moved here from Ohio, I figured I could spot her by watching for the car driving slow in the fast lane, lurching into the parking lot and then taking up two parking spaces.

But when I pulled into the lot, I spotted her car right away, parked a bit off by itself, windows rolled down. Ohio plates. Mardi Gras beads on the mirror. I waved to the woman sitting behind the wheel, and she smiled and waved back. Before either of us could say much, her cell phone rang and she answered the call.

Being in a bit of a hurry, I opened my car and began moving the baskets from my car to hers while she talked on the phone. I had quite a few baskets, so it took several trips, and I was feeling a little annoyed with her for not pausing her call long enough to at least offer to help. 

Still, it was no big deal. I wanted rid of the baskets and they were going to someone who could use them. I returned to my car and waved goodbye. She waved back. I headed for home, thinking no more about it.

Until the next day. When I got an email from the woman.

“I waited at the Moose lot for 25 minutes, but you never showed up. What happened?” 

I immediately emailed her back.  “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

She wasn’t kidding.

And she apparently wasn’t the only former Ohio person parked in the Moose lot in an older model blue car with Mardi Gras beads.

Yes, I had not only loaded the baskets in the wrong car, but the woman sitting right there in that wrong car had let me.

Who can’t interrupt a phone call long enough to stop a total stranger from filling their car with baskets?

I keep picturing that woman, back home in Ohio, telling her family about how West Virginians are friendly and generous, although perhaps a bit weird.  

Since this incident, I’ve learned the Charleston Job Corp, located close to the Moose Lodge, is training people (many of whom have come here from out of state, seeking jobs) to work at the Tri-State Racetrack & Gaming Center, which has the whole Mardi Gras theme going on, thus the beads everywhere.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 9:31 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.