Not For the Asking

I was in line at the general store, where the smell of hay mixed with dog kibble and the fly paper near the door did its best to hang on to a respectable quota of customers. I had one arm toilet paper and the other nursing a bag of Granny Smith apples—green and unforgiving, just like the woman who used to teach sixth grade at Margaret Keating Elementary.

It was the kind of day that felt reheated from the day before. I was third in line behind a man who smelled like gasoline and manure and a young mother wrangling a grocery cart that looked like it had already survived a demolition derby. Her boy—no taller than a sack of feed and twice as wiry—was wearing a Star Wars shirt with Luke Skywalk, laser beams, and space explosions.

You know the one. Every kid between three and thirty owned some variation of it, including me.

“Cool shirt,” I said, pointing to it and giving him my best non-threatening old man grin.

He didn’t smile. Instead, he looked me up and down like a rooster sizes up a stranger in the coop.

“You can’t wear it,” he said.

“I didn’t ask,” raising my eyebrows. I didn’t quite know the dress code had such strict enforcement these days.

“You’re too fat,” he declared. Loudly, proudly, and as if he’d just cracked a case wide open.

It gave me pause, and I blinked, then glanced at his mother—who looked like she wanted to crawl into the gum rack and stay there until judgment day. I could see her gearing up to apologize for the child she both loved and wanted to strangle.

But I beat her to the punch. I smiled at him and said, “I didn’t ask.”

And that was that.

He turned back to his mom, utterly unbothered, as if he’d declared the sky blue or cows go moo. I started to laugh—not out of offense but from the sheer honesty of it all—and eased my way into the line over, which moved slower but seemed free of fashion critics.

Back in my day, you didn’t call a grown man fat unless you were trying to get grounded until you were old enough to vote. But kids today don’t always come with filters.

They say what they mean, and half the time, they mean what they say. It’s brutal, sure—but there’s a certain purity in it, like drinking cold water from a garden hose. It might taste like rubber, but it’ll quench your thirst.

I watched them check out, the mom still pink in the cheeks, the boy humming the Star Wars theme and swinging a loaf of bread like a lightsaber. She gave me an apologetic nod on the way out, and I nodded back, still smiling.

Some days, you go to the store for apples and toilet paper and get a free lesson in humility from a three-year-old in light-up sneakers. The only thing left to do is to remember to laugh at yourself the next time life points out your belly.

Because the truth is, the kid wasn’t wrong.