So, being in retail for almost two years now has allowed me to see so many people from many walks of life. Which, when you think about it, is kinda cool, and I’ve met so many interesting people with different stories and backgrounds, it leaves me amazed at the lives other people have lived. I mean, I’ve had everyone from celebrities to Syrians that fought ISIS. It’s an interesting job, I will give it that, because makes me feel like Rick Harris from “Pawn Stars”, and you never know what is gonna come through that door. An interesting thing about that is I get to see things from a different perspective about people’s lives especially international customers.

Case in point, I recently had a group of Argentineans come into my store buying shades for friends. Turns out they were veterans of the Falkland War or the Guerra del Atlántico Sur as it’s called in Spanish. Turns out, they are still upset at the outcome of that war, so I got real smart and changed the subject from something that wasn’t as bitter. History is written by the victor but there will always be two sides to that coin. Ask anyone in the South about the American Civil War see what happens. In any case, I’m getting off track so I’ll move onto something more uplifting.

So this next one happened last summer, I was down in Jacksonville Florida living with my mom during the break and continuing my job as well. It was a dead afternoon during the week, I was talking with my one of my managers when two ladies came in. We started talking and doing our thing we do to sell, but I noticed one thing that stood out from one of them. Her right arm was amputated and by the looks of it I could tell that whatever caused it wasn’t clean. Curious I asked what happened to her and she joyfully told me her story of how she was hit by the propeller of a motor boat while swimming when she was a teenager.

The propeller managed to lacerate her right leg, sever her right arm and gashed the right side of her neck. She should have not been standing in my store more than thirty years after that ordeal by all accounts she should have been dead. Yet here she was standing here and telling me her story with a smile on her face. The blade barely missed her carotid. By both her account and the doctors, she survived because of a miracle because according to her “God just wasn’t done with me yet."

I had been going through a bit of a rough spot back home at the time to me, my life was in the toilet. To have someone to continue praising God more than three decades after an injury that left her permanently crippled and scared moved me to tears. I could do nothing but hugging her thanking her for opening my eyes. I asked where she was from and by some strange coincidence it turned out she lived near Dahlonega and she knew exactly where I went to school (a feat which is by no means easy to do in Florida). For whatever reason, we exchanged numbers that day I still have the card with her number on it, and I think about calling it every once in a while just to thank her for that day, but I’m not sure if she’ll remember who I am.

Course there have been plenty of weekends since I got back to Georgia where I’ve been at work and a part of me hopes she’ll come into my store and we can catch up. It’s funny now that I think about a person that I’ve only met once in my life and talked to for maybe 20 minutes at the most, and how she managed to make that much of an impact on me. It’s people like her that make my job as worthwhile as it’s been.