Today, after work, I stopped to get groceries. I rarely do this on a Friday night. Not that it matters. I spent about $15o on a wide range of food…some of which was even healthy. I paid with my debit card with its unreliable chip that tells the cashier the card is declined. This error (and, indeed, I’m compelled to tell you it’s THE CARD and NOT ME) invariably leaves me feeling like poor Debra Winger in that scene from “Terms of Endearment” in her character – a emotionally and financially struggling mother  – is humiliated by the cashier who yells to everyone in Creation that Debra doesn’t have enough money to pay for her groceries.  Thirty years later and I still want to punch the fictional cashier in the throat.

I rattled my cart of groceries out to my car and proceeded to load them into the back when I hear someone say, “Do you like perogies?” I was surprised both by the randomness of the question and its silliness because…come on!…WHO DOESN’T LIKE PEROGIES!

I peeked out around my car’s hatch to see an elderly women who, in retrospect, looked a bit like a Ukrainian version of Queen Elizabeth. She was dressed in a bright blue, well-worn cardigan, modest skirt, sensible orthopaedic shoes, and a bright floral head scarf tied in a very traditionally Ukrainian way (and, having worked at the Ukrainian Village historic site as a tour guide for three summers, I say this with some authority). The picture on the left gives you the general idea.

This woman, who was in her late 70s at least, looked at me through bright blue eyes and spoke to me with the kind of tired, but heartfelt enthusiasm one only finds in winter sunshine.

“I make perogies. I sell you them for $5,” she offered in a thick accent.

She pulled a small newspaper wrapped bundle from, of all things, a LaSenza bag. In the bundle was a baggy with perhaps eight homemade perogies. How did I know they were homemade? My friends…once you’ve seen homemade perogies made by a  Baba, you can spot them anywhere.

Now, I’m a debit card person. It is a rare day when I have cash on me. I prayed to any deity that might be listening that I could scrape together five bucks. I did. In change. And I placed the pile of loonies and quarters into hands that have never done anything but hard, physical work. And she gave me my perogies.

It was so unusual. The entire encounter made no sense until I saw her working her way through the grocery store parking lot, trying to sell little bundles of perogies.

And. My. Heart. Broke.

I immediately wrote her story in my head: poverty, homelessness. But it didn’t fit. She was well turned out, looked very healthy, had spectacularly white dentures. What then? What led this beauty to shuffle from person to car to person to sell her perogies in a parking lot?

Poverty cannot ruled out, of course. Single elderly women so often live below the poverty line in our wealthy country. Was it loneliness? The need to be useful, to continue to work and contribute in some way? I wrote many stories for that woman…all of them heartbreaking.

But what was the hardest to watch was how person after person in that parking lot said no to her $5 perogies. Or wouldn’t roll down their car window to speak to her…like she was some twitching meth head threatening their lives.

I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to run to the bank machine with my faulty debit card and take out all my money and hand it to her. But I didn’t know her story. I only knew the one I’d written in my head. And that story hurts and haunts me. I hope I’m wrong. I hope she’s a shrewd business woman who sheds the Baba get up when she gets home and counts her perogy-begotten gains while she laughs with her family.

Then there was this moment. The moment when I thanked her for the perogies. The moment she thanked me back and said, “Happy Mothers’ Day.”

Whoever you are and whatever your story…Happy Mother’s Day to you, too.