The other night I went to a dinner party. The gracious hosts asked my friend Caroline and I to bring the dessert. Since I don’t really bake, I went to Kroger and picked up a frozen apple crumble pie. I asked Carol to get the vanilla ice cream to accompany the pie.
We came up with this great idea to take the pie out of the box and pretend we made it from scratch. I wrapped the pie in the most southern looking towel I could find, and walked about 2 blocks to the dinner party. Very old fashioned of me, right?
The dinner was just fabulous. We had stuffed peppers, asparagus, rolls and macaroni and cheese. But the best part about the meal was this: 5 friends gathered around a table. Friends, who had already weathered college together, graduation, marriage, relocations of many varieties and many other obstacles that often drift people away from one another. There we were, gathered around the table sharing a meal together—and yes, life and the relationships have changed, as they very well should! But the blessing it is to be around a table like that, is one of the most beautiful joys in life and a privilege that I’m not quite sure how I earned.
After dinner we put the pie in the oven. Carol had forgotten to grab the vanilla ice cream and since we had a good 30-45 minutes as the pie that “we slaved over the night prior ‘re-baked’”, we decided to make a Kroger run.
We dashed to the store, went straight to the frozen isle, grabbed the vanilla ice cream and went to pay. Our quest for ice cream came to a shrieking halt when Carol’s card was denied. We tried 4 different times to pay “try it as credit this time…” denied. “I’ll just take it to the cashier and see if it works…” denied. I would have offered to pay myself, except I walked over to the dinner party and left my wallet at home.
Oh dear. It seemed as though we were going to have to go back to the dinner party empty handed. However, thanks to technology, and the iPhone, no obstacle can get in the way of a girl and her dessert. Carol got out her iPhone and transferred money from her savings account to her checking, and within minutes we were back in business. Online banking…it’s a Godsend. We literally cheered and jumped up and down at the Kroger Self Scan as people around looked at us like “is it really that exciting to buy vanilla ice-cream?” In that moment, yes—yes it was.
I often catch myself getting caught up in moments like that, afterwards I laugh at the eagerness of the situation. The ice cream was at our fingertips, only a couple dollars, and yet we very well may have had to walk out of the store empty handed. It’s silly, I know, and it’s even more ridiculous how desperate we were for that vanilla ice cream.
On the way back to the car, I couldn’t help but wonder—is this really what your mid-twenties comes to—tapping into your savings account to buy vanilla ice cream? You can’t help but laugh at the ridiculousness of it. But sometimes it’s true.
How many things are at your fingertips, yet so far out of reach? How many things are you ready for, but you know you just haven’t earned yet? Things never happen the way you want them to or think that they should. I have found at this age it’s hard to find something to stand firm on. It’s hard to find security in a world that’s constantly shifting, friends that are constantly moving on, getting married, having babies, relocating and on and on. You may find yourself very much in between it all. But in the end, it always works out—what is going to happen is even better than anything you could imagine for yourself. You just have to be patient and shift with the changes. Sometimes it takes shifting money around from one bank account to another to remind me of that.
