I’ve tossed the 30 days of shamelessness in the corner with my dirty clothes. What I learned while attempting this challenge is that I do not like being told what to write about. It’s not motivating to me.
What I also realized is that almost everything I write here reveals something about me that I should perhaps be ashamed of, and yet I write anyway. I could probably go back through my old posts and link each of them to one day of the shameless topics. Hmmm…an idea.
Yesterday, trying to be a good friend, I offered to assist Angela with a few errands. She needed to get a vehicle to her boyfriend’s son and deliver some cupcakes she’d made to a tea shop’s grand opening.
“I’ll put the cupcakes in your car, and drive the truck,” she said as we were getting ready to leave.
We carefully strapped a 3-tier set of plastic transport boxes into the seatbelt in my back seat to keep them from flying around. Drive carefully, I reminded myself as I followed Angela out of her neighborhood.
As I drove, I drew up a to-do list in my head for later, and made sure I stayed close enough on her tail so as not to lose her, since I didn’t know where we were going.
When she dropped off the truck and climbed into my passenger seat, I made to turn around in an open parking spot.
“Oh no!” she gasped, looking over my shoulder.
“What? Can I not turn around here?”
“Look.”
It took me only seconds to see what had left her nearly speechless. While the transport boxes had been kept firmly in place by the seatbelt, the mini cupcakes had tumbled around inside the boxes from my sharp stops and lead footed starts. I was mortified.
“Oh my god,” I said. “Oh my god. I’m so sorry!”
We sat there for a few moments contemplating the mess inside the boxes. Fortunately, we were to be making the delivery well before the grand opening was set to begin.
Angela made a quick inventory of what she would need in order to recreate the ruined cupcakes. “I’m buying the ingredients,” I said. “It was my fault you need to start over.”
I felt awful, but she was such a trooper about it. She had been having a bad day before this fiasco and had a miserable evening to look forward to, but all she could do was laugh.
“Things happen for a reason,” she ventured. “I needed a distraction, something to keep me busy this afternoon. Now I have it!”
We weren’t far from a grocery store and so made a quick stop for the necessary items and headed back to her kitchen to begin again. We worked in tandem to prep the cupcake batter and get them into the oven. When there wasn’t much left for me to do with cupcake prep, I made us a late lunch since we’d forgone eating in lieu of baking.
After we’d eaten and the cupcakes were cooling, I started washing the dirty dishes.
“You are so great!” Angela observed, referring to my pitching in to clean up her kitchen.
I looked up at her, a wry smile on my face. “Is that what we are going with?” I asked.
