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My charges in Mid City, Nick and Josh, are exposed to all kinds of homeless people which have been pushed from the Claiborne Overpass to our area because the Victory church on Broad offers food for them. Since we’ve been reading a lot of books, we sort of casually came up with the word “snaggletooths” for these homeless men instead of “bums”.  The kids know they don’t want to be that when they get older for sure! Watching these guys living on the street and drinking beer all day reinforces their focus on reading and doing well in school.

I took Nick and Josh to the Mid City library on Saturday to get their prizes for reading their required eight books for the summer reading program. They got an unexpected bag of loot as a reward! Pizza certificates, free Frosties, and a pass to Audubon Zoo were all included. We thought we’d earn just one of these prizes but we earned all of them. Wow!

Josh chose some more books, among others, he got some from the Arthur series and Captain Underpants and we also sprinkled in some picture books which are funny and have great illustrations and squirrely use of words which make us laugh and teaches them about the elasticity of the english language. We got a bag full of books for the next couple of weeks.

After we got our loot-bag and books, we went to the Wendy’s on St. Charles Ave. to get our free Frosties and the boys said they wanted salads. I thought that idea would be patently ditched once we got to Wendy’s but it wasn’t. Our food took forever and some patrons were really getting pissy. One patron scared the boys in his scant-nasty painter’s outfit. This guy was complaining rudely and loudly about the gay guy behind the counter who was serving food, it seems he wanted to blame the whole entire slow service issue on the gay guy.  He was not aware that he was scaring the kids with his long, wild hair, filthy clothes and his head-to-toe anger, the first in a whole social house-of-horrors unfolding before us.

I was disgusted at the whole situation but I was calm and patient and so were the kids.  The challenge of being cool was pushed to the limit when the second asshole in line also started lashing out verbally at the staff about the slow service in general. 

To his complete credit, the gay guy behind the counter serving people responded to both assholes utterly apologetically and professionally.  

Then, it got worse. We were attacked by a battallion of “snaggletooths”.  We got our Frosties and Nick said he wanted to bring our food home. I knew he was probably right, but I said it would be nice to sit down and eat at a table together, we decided to try it.

To no avail, when the BLT salads they ordered finally arrived the resident Wendy’s bums swooped down on our booth. It was like a Micheal Jackson Thriller video.  One of the female “snaggletooths” approached our table and said something like this, “Can you help me with my “chirrans, insurance??”  Truthfully, I am not quite sure what she was saying but she was scary. . . my patience had run out. I looked her straight in the eye and said very cheerfully, “Absolutley not.”

The kids and I swiftly packed up our food and skidaddled out of there gracefully and enjoyed a very peaceful lunch at home.  The kids were so well behaved, I took them to the Zoo on Sunday. We didn’t let that episode ruin our great weekend.

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