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NEVER GETTING TO SEE TOMORROW
I was not in the best of moods, which was not unusual for me. It was raining quite hard and I had to walk all the way out to the darn road just to pick up the mail, most of which was generally junk anyway.
Just as I was about to reached the mailbox, the wind caught my umbrella turning it inside out. The black deformed piece of silk then blew out of my hands, twisting my wrist and shot skyward as though it had a life of its own. I just stood there gritting my teeth, shaking my wet head back and forth, and mumbled a few choice words under my breath. I quickly opened the mailbox, grabbed the mail and started running as fast as I could back toward the front porch.
By the time I reached the porch, I was totally soaked from head to toe, as was the entire handful of mail. I used a few more coarse words, jerked opened the large garbage can lid and slammed the entire large bundle of mail, cards and magazines right into the filthy smelling creature, which had not been washed out for months. I slammed the lid back down as hard as I could, catching my little finger in the process. I then turned around, kicked the large green container as hard as I could, hurting my foot.
I sat down on the old passenger back seat, which I had removed several months earlier from my 1986 Chevy van and rubbed my sore toe and foot. The more my toe throbbed, the madder I became. Finally I kicked at the old, blue slipper that I had been wearing, trying to get it near the front door. But oh no, it could not go to the door where I had instructed it to go. It had to fly in the opposite direction, fall off the top step of the porch and land in a large puddle of water. It then filled itself with the rain water, which was falling off the roof in buckets.
Using more coarse words, I hobbled toward the steps planning to go out in the rain to retrieve the drowned slipper. Of course, I slipped when I hit the first wet step and busted my ‘you know what,’ slid down the three wet steps and landed in the large puddle of water with my floating slipper. I snatched the slipper and threw it as hard as I could toward the porch, but it hit the banister and bounced back at me, hitting me square in the face, filling my half open, foul mouth with dirty rain water. I could finally take no more so I just fell over backwards into the large puddle, shook my wet head and wondered what the heck could possibly happen to me next.
After making it into the house, I showered and dressed, and as my red light was on, I sat down at the computer to see who had sent me an email. To my surprise, it was an email about one of my stories from my abusive years in the orphanage and how that story had personally changed some young woman's life.
But as I read on, it became even more than I could have imagined. It told how this individual's life was about to change because of one of my stories and that because of this major change, the lives of her children were about to change too, as were the lives of their children one day and their children in the future, maybe even on for a thousand years or more.
At the end of her letter, she thanked me and told me that the children of the future would never know who I was or what I had done when I was alive, and that they would never have the honor of meeting me. She also told me that I was a very lucky person because I was alive today and that I was able to go at anytime to look in the mirror and meet the wonderful man who had caused this all to happen to the future.
I pushed back from my desk, leaned back in my office chair and looked down at my wet slipper. I am so thankful that the children of the future were not standing on my front porch half an hour ago. But I did learn this from the letter. Just because we are not always good people, all the time, doesn't mean that we can't always do good things for other people, "all the time."