Help! What would you have done?

Posted in Julie's columns, Mom Stuff
by Julie Wallace

I had a really really weird experience Sunday at the Cleveland Indians game.

Aside from arriving in the third inning — a horrendous traffic jam had my 5-year-old daughter near tears that we wouldn’t arrive in time to receive a Slider hat (it was his birthday gala, after all) — she and I were having a pretty good day once we got into the stadium, secured the all-important Slider hat and grabbed our traditional game-day munchies before settling into our seats.

After she guzzled down her pink lemonade, we bought two bottles of water from a vendor for $4 a pop. We’d only taken a sip or two when she spotted Slider on our side of the stadium. Off we went — we must say hi to Slider, you know.

After we accomplished that (a matter of minutes — we weren’t gone long), we headed back to our seats. The problem? A little boy that had been sitting behind us was settled into an empty seat beside ours, and he was putting the lid BACK on my water bottle.

“What are you doing with my water?” I asked.

Clearly, he hadn’t seem me return, and he had the `uh oh’ look in his eyes.

“Did you drink out of my water?” I asked.

“No,” he answered.

“So what were you doing?”

That’s when his mother or guardian — still sitting behind us, watching this exchange — chimes in. “He gave it to someone.”

(And yes, I’m astounded at this point that she so matter-of-factly tells me this, as if this is NOT a problem.)

“What? He gave my water to someone?” I responded, looking at the little boy.“I hope you have $4, because that is how much it cost and I’m not drinking it now.”

He clearly wasn’t liking the way this was going. He looked at the woman, and back at me, and then at her again. “Just pay her,” she told him in a tone that I didn’t exactly interpret as being a lesson builder for the little guy.

He handed over $5, and I gave him a dollar change. But then I realized he had to reach across one full water bottle to get to the one I saw him touching. Hmmmm, guess what? Now, I have two bottles of water I’m not touching.

So I anted up yet another $8 for two more bottles. And when my daughter had to go to the bathroom, the kind lady next to us — we are in season seats, so we’ve sat alongside each other before — said very loudly: “Here, give me your waters to hold so they don’t take them again.”

When I got home, my significant other said he would have gone and gotten an usher. It was stealing, he said, and I should have made them aware of it.

I guess I was just more flabbergasted — I’d never let my daughter drink from a stranger’s bottled water, and I’d certainly never allow my child to take someone else’s water. I sort of felt like I was to blame for leaving it there — I had my hands full of other stuff when we raced up the stairs in pursuit of Slider — but shouldn’t we be able to since they are our seats?

A worse thought is that what if I had not returned and saw him fiddling with it? I wouldn’t have known he or one of the other boys with him (there were three altogether) had been drinking from it, and — GULP — probably resumed drinking it myself.

I’m not one of those insane germaphobes, but still ….yeck!!

–Julie Wallace