My Most Embarrassing Moment This Week

This whole trying to run my own publishing business thing has slap worn me out. Yesterday the kids and I were at the post office trying to figure out how to mail another package. The postal worker asked if I’d like to buy some stamps in addition to mailing my package. I said yes and she pulled out a sheet with all sorts of stamps on it so I could choose what I wanted.

Pause and understand that it’s late afternoon on a cold, rainy, winter day and I had been going since 3:30 a.m. My reading glasses were somewhere buried in the bottom of my purse and I didn’t want to dig them out again for the umpteenth time that day. I said, “I can’t really see any of them so let’s just go with this brightly colored one.”

She said, “Oh, the breast cancer stamps.”

I took a closer look and through my blurry eyes all those colors looked like one of those colored images from some sort of medical test, the kind where they look inside your body. My mind was thinking, “It’s a picture of a test where they looked inside a woman’s breast to determine if she has breast cancer.” My mouth said very loudly, “Is that a picture of a breast?”

The postal worker was aghast, but trying to hold back laughter. In her boisterous voice she said, “No, honey, that ain’t no breast! That would be called pornography and putting that on a stamp would be illegal!”

At that moment every ounce of blood drained from my teenagers’ bodies. I’m certain that if you look up the word “mortification” in the dictionary their picture is there.

But the postal worker and I had a great laugh. I just hope the businessman behind me was eventually able to regain his composure.