I buy cereal at Sam’s. I haven’t made the full calculation on whether it’s actually cheaper to buy cereal there or not but I do it anyway. I like the big boxes with the double bags in there. It’s a good feeling to carry a huge prism full of cereal to my car. Recently I went on a Saturday and I wasn't aware that Saturday is “Free sample” day at Sam’s so everyone was walking around eating or drinking something. The hot item of the day was apparently a full sized can of Coca Cola Zero, everyone was walking along sipping on their calorie-less soda one guy even had two. As I walked past the crowd huddled around the employee handing out the cans and delivering his rehearsed speech of the greatness of Coke a father and daughter caught my eye. The dad was in his late 30s probably, though I am bad at guessing ages, he was a large blonde man he was wearing boots and had one of those halfway zip up sweaters that non working class men wear, the soft kind, also in my mind he probably drives a Ford F350. He said something to the employee, laughed loudly, then put his arm on the shoulders of his little girl as they “play ran” back to their shopping cart. His little girl was probably around seven, or six she had on a purple sweater, pink pants, and she had inherited her father’s size. The dad grabbed the cart and took off the little girl playfully chasing after him. I thought that was a sweet moment and kept heading towards the cereal.

I stood in the cereal aisle and was being indecisive about what to get. I had a hard time choosing between two options. One is my favorite, but this other box has three types of cereal. I really only like one cereal out of those three, I’ll just take the usual. As soon as I finished that thought I heard laughs, and a cart being pushed around fast. Through the cereal In the other aisle I could see that it was the same Dad and Girl from before. The father was running ahead of the cart and would throw back onto the cart whatever he was shopping for the little girl was now pushing the cart and every time something would hit the cart she would laugh, which would propel the dad to run farther ahead and throw something else in the cart. At this point the little girl took a break chasing after her dad and stood next to the cart and was taking a sip of her diet soda when a box of granola bars came flying at her hit her right in soda hand and knocked the can out of her hand spilling the soda all over of her face and sweater. “Dad!!” The little girl cried out, “Wha?!” the dad said as he put down a box of granola looking back. “You hit meeeee” The girl said as her voice broke slightly. “Oh……..” I switched my focus to the dad and I could see in his eyes how he was trying to figure out what to say, maybe he’d been in a situation like this before, maybe with the girl’s mom or with someone else but it was clear that this playful attitude had resulted in him taking things “too far” before and someone getting hurt or offended and that more than once he’d shut down a playfull situation by not being careful. This wasn’t new to him, except I could see in his eyes that he didn’t want to hurt his daughter he didn’t want him to hate him and he didn’t want to stop playing. “Oh….” he said again, “It’s ok we’ll go get you another coke.” His daughter said nothing and He reached out and held his little girl’s hand as he helped her wipe down the sticky soda and as they walked down towards the soda man I could see the dad unloading things from the cart which were only placed there to begin with because he and his daughter were playing.