The Wise Old Turtle

  I was driving back home from picking up a plastic barrel for making armor. I was out on a dirt road, just off the edge of nowhere, driving by a cross street.  I glanced off to my left to look for traffic...there was none, just the dust hanging in the sunlight. And there, just beginning to cross onto the road I was driving down, was a very large turtle, making his way one step at a time. 

  I stopped, being impressed and somewhat awed that a turtle would survive to be this big in parts where turtle stew must be a delicacy...in any event, he was a grand sight. I watched him take a few steps, somehow acheiving grace in slow motion, and making the word "plod" somehow a thing deserving of respect.  I looked behind him at his tracks through the sandy, dusty, dirt road, looking back at them running off into the distance, and wondering how long it took him to come down that road.

  

  "Hey there, grandfather. How are you doing?" I asked of him.

  

  He looked at me, pausing in mid-step, and blinked, at this apparition which had suddenly appeared out of nowhere in a cloud of dust.

  "Try walking a mile in my shoes, sonny," was his reply.

Indeed.  

My trials and tribulations are small compared to a stroll in his shoes. 

Live long and prosper, grandfather turtle.