Tiramisu cake at 9 a.m.

We all have the same right to enjoy nice things.

I’m linking up (a day late!) with the Five Minute Friday community, writing for five minutes on a given prompt. This week’s word is SAME.

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I hesitated to write this post because I thought it might come across as humblebragging or virtue signaling — but I think incidents like this are significant and can teach us something if we let them.

I stopped at the grocery store yesterday morning to pick up a few things. I went to the self-checkout as I usually do, and as I was finishing up, a young man came to the next checkout. He looked pretty rough and grubby and had a big backpack. He was buying one item: a tiramisu cake.

I couldn’t help thinking, That probably costs at least $15.00 — there are so many better, more nutritious ways you could spend that money. I also wondered what he was doing buying a one-and-a-half-pound cake at 9:00 in the morning.

He tried to pay for the cake with a card, but it didn’t work. He asked a staff member for help, and she tried the card a few times, but the machine still rejected it. "I just got this card this morning,” he said in frustration.

“I think you’ll have to go back to the bank,” the staff member said kindly. She took the cake back from him and began to void his transaction, and he started to leave.

I quickly told the employee I would pay for the cake, so she called him back (she called him “Sir,” which I thought was so nice and respectful). I jokingly told the guy he’d better not look at my PIN, so he turned his back to me while I paid (the cake was $16.94). Then he thanked me and left.

As I was driving out of the parking lot, I saw him in front of the store, eating the cake.

I wonder why my first thought was that he could have spent that money more appropriately? If it had been a well-dressed person buying a tiramisu cake, I wouldn’t have judged their purchasing decisions in the same way; I wouldn’t have thought, “You know, you could buy a bag of apples and a block of cheese for that.” I mean, I’ve bought a $17 cake plenty of times without interrogating myself for it. Why shouldn’t he do the same?

And as to what he was going to do with it — well, he was going to eat it, of course. Why else would he be getting it? That’s the same reason I buy cake. It made perfect sense. He wanted to get a cake and eat it.

You don’t need to earn the right to enjoy things. Obviously, when you go to a store to buy something, it works best if you have the money to cover it. And maybe an entire tiramisu cake isn’t an ideal breakfast. But a person doesn’t have less of a right to enjoy nice, delicious things just because they’re down on their luck.

I think those of us who aren’t focused on day-to-day survival can easily forget that. We often have this mental checklist of things that less fortunate people should do or have first, before they’re allowed to have the special things we enjoy without a second thought. Maybe we need to give others the same latitude we give ourselves — or at least ask ourselves why we sometimes apply a different set of rules.

Anyway, I hope he enjoyed his cake. I hope it wasn’t his only meal that day. I hope he felt the world was a slightly more hospitable place because he got his cake and someone called him “Sir.”