“If you’re not a teacher, you should be.”

Per usual, the line at the movie theater was outrageously long. I suppose that’s what I get for going to see a movie on a Sunday afternoon, but standing around with forty other people waiting for one of three registers to open so I can order an overpriced Coke is never going to be a pleasant experience, especially when I’m surrounded by families. Worse still, I’m surrounded by children.

My arms are folded and defensive, I may or may not be flexing so the girl in the Paramore shirt can see the muscles I don’t have. Her hair is blue and black, and it looks like she’s there with her boyfriend. “Doesn’t matter,” I think to myself, “I’m miles better looking than that guy.” His hair is dry and curly, a frizzy mop given the humid weather outside. He’s wearing a brown shirt that’s two sizes too big. “At least my clothes fit,” I say to myself, even though it probably looks like I got my shirt from the children’s section of H&M. Whatever.

In the few minutes that I’ve been standing here quietly judging the guy in front of me, the line has moved maybe a few inches. The family in front of us is taking forever to order, and apparently they’re going to order one of everything on the menu. Their final tally comes up to roughly sixty bucks. Sixty fucking dollars for food at a movie theater…Jesus Christ, what kind of society do we live in where that’s even remotely okay?

The future seems dark and relatively hopeless. The line isn’t moving and I’m the only pretty person here. Ugh, woe is me. The family in front of us finally walks away with their literal bags of food, and thankfully Paramore-girl and mop-head are only buying a bottle of water. I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and I’m on my way to reaching the paradise of the theater seats. So it seemed, anyway, until one of the children to my right decides to start kicking and screaming for no reason.

This child is screaming its goddamn head off, and per my grumpy being I hang my head in annoyance. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” I mutter, “Would you mind shutting that kid up?”

Everyone’s staring, needless to say. The child’s mother is mortified and failing miserably at trying to quiet her daughter. No one wants to help, and the only thing the woman behind me can say is “Aww, poor kid.” Poor kid? Poor kid? You’re joking, right? I’m the one that has to suffer through this screaming. Poor me.

And then it happens. Christ himself descends from the sky and kneels down in front of the child, palms resting gently on her shoulders. He looks deeply into her eyes and says, “Be still, my child. All is right.” Jesus then reaches into his robes and pulls out a box of Buncha Crunch, offering the candy up to the child as a peace offering. The child, in awe of what just happened, takes the candy in utter glee and wraps her arms around her savior. “Thank you, Jesus! I love you!”

The son of God then spreads his arms, hands open and palms up, looks to the sky, and departs for Heaven. A warm glow surrounds the theater, and everyone begins to applaud. “Christ is risen!” shouts one woman, followed by another man shouting “Praise be to Him!”

…

Okay, so maybe Jesus didn’t actually descend from Heaven to hush the crying child, but a man did kneel down to her to make an attempt at quieting her.

The man, dressed in a blue t-shirt emblazoned with the image of Pac-Man, steps toward the child and rests his palms on her shoulders. The little girl is mortified. Her crying has ceased and now, I’m sure, she just wants to know why the fuck this weird old man is touching her. He leans in close and says, “You think you have it bad now?”

“You’ve got it easy kid. Save those tears for later. You haven’t had your heart broken yet, you don’t have student loans to take out, you aren’t dying, and you’re about to see a movie. Things could be worse.”

The girl, still staring at the man blankly, asks “How?”

So the guy sits down and crosses his legs and tells the girl flat out, “We all die someday. I’m going to die, you’re going to die…why cry over candy? Why waste the tears? Save them for what really matters. Save those tears for when you’re drowning in debt and you don’t know how you’re going to make rent.”

By now the girl is totally silent, and has her arm wrapped around her mother’s leg. The man stands up, and people actually start clapping. The woman behind me says to him, “If you’re not a teacher, you should be.” He nods, chuckles, and says thank you. He’s proud of himself, and apparently proud of his grim little diatribe.

I’m fucking mortified though. His discussion of reality now has me thinking about my eventual death and the fact that I, too, have student loans to pay back.

Another woman, who didn’t hear the man’s speech, asks “What did you tell her?”

He smiles, leans in — this dude has a hard-on for leaning, I swear it — and says, “I just told her about how awful life can be. She doesn’t understand concepts like death and debt right now, but one day she will and she’ll realize that crying over candy is so totally inane.” There’s intelligence in his reasoning, and I see his point. I still wonder why the hell he would say that to a child instead of something lighter. Maybe this guy had issues of his own, right?

This man is the hero today, and I feel like the villain. He helped and I just quietly complained. He was relatively selfless in his attempts to quell the little girl’s cries, and I just wanted to tell the girl to shut up. Good and evil, I think, light and dark. He may not be Jesus, and he may not even be a teacher…but maybe he should be.