Our Idea of a Bad Day

–Our idea of a bad day and what a bad day is can be quite at odds–At first it seemed like one of those days where nothing goes right. The new checks I ordered had the bank’s old name and they wouldn’t redo the order unless I paid a fee. The prescription they sent had the wrong cap and I couldn’t open the bottle, and they couldn’t, they said, send an empty bottle with the right non safety cap, I would have to wait until my next order several months hence. The person I needed to reach in order to decide whether or not to renew a newspaper wasn’t there. The post box at the corner where I needed to mail a letter has been removed. The reimbursement check I was expecting didn’t arrive….. My day in short was filled with little annoyances, little disappointments, things that made me feel I was wasting time and effort. Then I moved on to read one of the newsletters I follow in order to write this blog, and there was a story about the youngsters, age 10 to 18, who migrate from Africa, Iraq, even China to Europe in order to find work, a better life, some even sent by their parents in hope they will earn money to send back home. Here was a youngster still traumatized from the war in Sierra Leone or one whose father sold his cab to pay smugglers to take him from Iraq to Germany. They’ve known bad days in ways I and most of those I know can’t fathom, enough to make me, along with many others, rethink what a bad day really is.