So, we're in Edmonton trying our hardest to buy ALL the baby stuff we could foreseeably need during our next stint of northern seclusion. The dogs are at the boarder's, Rex is hotelling it up with us, and all day today and all afternoon yesterday we've trudged down baby aisle after baby aisle, price checking, quality checking, and organic/chemical-free/sustainability checking ... even though I'm surprised at the limited selection of baby goods available in mainstream stores. I thought people were baby shopping crazy. Maybe they're just internet baby shopping crazy.
Anyway, when we pulled into our hotel parking lot last night at about eleven, we noticed a scraggly old guy eyeing us up, and we figured that since we were in a pretty well-lit area, it wasn't a big deal. He stopped when he knew we were parking, and kind of hung around until we got out of the truck. By the time I rounded the vehicle, I could hear Brad saying sorry to the guy, that he couldn't help, but the guy was insistent. His story? He'd just come from the Baptist church, and his family was stranded in his van on the side of the highway, and he needed Brad to drive him to a tow truck place. Apparently, his two week old baby was also in the abandoned, broken down van. Brad said he had no money on him (he really didn't). The guy said he HAD money in his wallet, but what he needed was a RIDE. Brad said we couldn't help.
This is exactly what was going through our heads as this guy was playing out his story: first of all, you call a tow truck, you don't hitch a ride and show up at a middle of nowhere tow truck lot at eleven o'clock on a Sunday night. And if you've already walked all the way from the highway and into a hotel parking lot, you'd just go in and use the courtesy phone to call for a tow, right? But, ok, if you really wanted to hire your towperson face-to-face, and you HAD money in your wallet, why would you be hanging out in an economy hotel parking lot trying to bum a ride? -- you'd just get a cab, right? And also, the dude was, like, sixty -- there was definitely no two week old of his in existence, anywhere.
And then ... you know how when something happens, and you forget about it, but then sometime in the future you're reminded, but the memory takes its time to surface -- kind of like a Magic Eight Ball answer? This is exactly what happened last night. Because, in the midst of being berated for our apathy by some random guy in an empty parking lot, I remembered being in this exact place, late at night last October, and having this same guy try to borrow money from us to call a tow truck to tow his family van off of the highway, where he claimed he'd just broken down.
And all of a sudden I was like WAIT. JUST. A. FREAKING. MINUTE. Now you've upped your story to scam a ride? And Brad had the exact same memory surface at the exact same time, just when the guy threw up his hands in disgust and yelled "what is WRONG with you people?!" (which may have been enough to make us feel guilty if not for our abrupt deja vu).
And I wish I had some heroic story of how I confronted the guy and told him he'd tried this on us nearly a year ago, but I'm willing to settle with the result that Brad didn't get hacked up and carjacked last night because some felon used some trumped-up guilt trip to get Brad to drive him into the very abandoned and very dark industrial section of the city.
Am I being dramatic? I don't know. But I'm happy enough to not find out.
