One good moose

Yesterday as my mother and I loaded up the van after a shopping trip at Zellers a 60-something-year-old lady ran across the parking lot to catch us. I thought we must have left something behind at the cash. “You’re the ones with the bobble-head moose on the dash,” she said. Her breath came in short gasps, so anxious was she not to miss us before we drove away. “I was going to leave a note on your windshield.” Turns out she had been searching for a bobble-head moose to bring back to her grand-son in Nova Scotia who had specifically asked for one.

Now our bobble-head had only been on the dash a week. We picked him up for $3.99 at the Dollar Shop in Flowers Cove on the Northern Peninsula. As we have had a moose-filled spring and summer — all safe encounters, thank God — I thought the bobble-head a fitting trophy for our van.

We had stopped in driving rain to eat lunch at L and E Restaurant in Flower’s Cove. After a scrumptious meal of hot chowder and Caesar salad, we all ambled across the dirt lot to the Dollar Shop. Surprise Baby knew what he wanted instantaneously — a set of tacky plastic golf clubs, which he waved around at the Vikings we met later in the day. The two teenagers shared a headphone splitter so they could watch their endless movies in the back of the van with two earphones each instead of just one. For me it was a tossup between a licence plate and the moose. Lucky for the lady in the Zeller’s lot, I settled on the moose. I doubt her grandchild had a Dead Man’s Cove Come Home Year licence plate on his souvenir list.

When I told the lady where the nearest dollar stores were, it dawned on me it would be a lot easier to just give her the moose rather than send her on a potential wild goose chase. After all, who knew if Townie dollar shops stock bobblehead moose. When I picked up old Moosey off the dash, a glazed look came across her eyes. She seemed in shock. I thought Surprise Baby, belted in his booster seat in the back, might protest to see Moosey leave with this lady. But even he knew a good thing when he saw it.

“She really wanted our moose, didn’t she, Susan?” He quit calling me Mommy out of the blue one day on the Northern Peninsula.

“Yes, she did,” I answered as the lady and her friend jigged their way to their vehicle, big smiles on their faces.

If I had handed her a million dollars cash, she wouldn’t have been any happier. Sometimes it doesn’t take a heck of a lot to make someone’s day.