My favorite people

Today as we waited in a checkout line in Walmart, along with quite a few other people, a middle-aged man barged through the lines with his buggy (that's a shopping cart for any non-Southerners) to a previously-unopened register while a manager opened the register and began to check him out while another manager stood nearby.

He yelled at the managers and told them he wasn't going to do their job for them by checking himself out at the self-check registers and that he was busy and had places to be! He just wanted to get his stuff and check out and go!

I'm sorry … don't the rest of us waiting patiently in line want to do that also?

No one knew who the guy was. He was not “important” except in his own mind.

I don't know how self-centered you have to be to act like the entire world is there simply for you and to make you happy, but this guy lived there. Except he wasn't. Happy, that is.

He was angry, stressed and … well, a jerk.

A little girl around age 5 or 6, meanwhile, stood at the register between where I was and the angry man was, playing with her battery-operated fan that had flashing lights and a dog in a fireman's hat. She left the woman she was with and walked up to the man in line behind them, showing him her fan.

He smiled and asked her about her toy. She told him the character's name and that he was a fireman.

He asked if she liked firemen.

She nodded and said, “My favorite people are superheroes.”

Wow. What a contrast.

She basically called firefighters superheroes – people who rush into structures and situations most of us run away from. People who often are quiet servants who don't look for praise and often seem quite embarrassed by it.

And here this little girl stood near a man who was so self-centered that he probably didn't even see her.

I prefer the people who serve with hard work and humility, also.

My favorite people are superheroes, too.