Author Archives: Sam Ross Jr.

We have a local group, Vision Together 2025, trying to raise the population of the Greater Johnstown area by trolling for refugees. Except you can’t call them refugees, but rather “legally vetted immigrants.”

In the way that the guy (or girl) collecting your garbage might be called a sanitation engineer but is still a garbage collector, so it is that the Vision people are big on semantics and euphemisms to make things sound less harsh.

Let’s concentrate on the term “vetted.” It makes one think of Supreme Court justices, high level political candidates and Cabinet appointees, among others, all being vetted to make sure they have what it takes.

When done right, it’s a thorough examination of a person’s character and qualifications for a job. But who will be vetting these “legally vetted immigrants?”

That is not a detail you will find on the organization’s Facebook page. Myopia problems for Vision Together?

What you will find are assurances that all will be legal residents of the United States. Of late the topic of a possible inflow of immigrants here has turned to discussions of displaced Afghans.

A quick internet search showed that Afghan refugees (I will use the word) are unhappy in general with slow progress in awarding them citizenship, but hold out hopes for speedier legislative solutions.

A Green Card is a temporary measure, but a holder of a Green Card is not a citizen.

Also, it was interesting to read that some Republican lawmakers on a national level have doubts about how good the vetting process will be for Afghan refugees.

Recall that the Biden regime made a mess out of the U.S. pullout from Afghanistan and do you really trust these same boobs to guarantee no undesirables got on planes or other transportation headed to our country?

Early in the discussion about immigrants in general being recruited to settle in Johnstown, terms “skilled workers” and “highly skilled workers” were tossed around.

It was implied and sometimes stated outright that they would readily find employment here and not be a further boost to our growing industry of life spent on the government dole.

Again, what does that “skilled” or “highly skilled” verbiage mean? A person with a talent for making mud bricks could be said to be skilled, but does that translate to landing a job here?

Statistics vary, but the best literacy rate I could find quoted for Afghanistan is 43 percent, meaning that underwhelming percentage of people 15 years of age and older can read or write – in their language. The global literacy rate is reported as a touch over 86 percent.

Are we to presume that all of our refugees will come from the 43 percent able to read and write, albeit not necessarily in English?

As is customary with such issues, anyone who would like more information, who would like to see specifics cited and not just the vague generalities, is labeled as a racist, bigot or otherwise undesirable person not fit to breathe. Homophobia is not yet being tossed around to tar critics, perhaps because homosexuality is widely disapproved of by followers of Islam.

Last, the refugee recruiters are trying to inflict guilt on those not eagerly going along with it all, noting this is a region that once was a hotbed for immigrants.

That is true. But those immigrants, as some have noted, came for plentiful jobs in steel mills or mines, neither of which are anywhere near as widely available now. And those jobs back in the day were not described as skilled labor.

Also, the immigrants who settled here long ago, bought into the melting pot philosophy. They might speak the language of their home country at their residences, but they understood that their children had to speak and be taught in English and had to know English for the workplace.

This is not the common philosophy these days in America, particularly among many refugees/immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries. This helps explain why the local Sears store, before it was closed, had “Caballero” signs above the men’s dressing rooms.

It explains, too, why virtually every time you need telephone assistance, an automated voice has you press 1 or some other number for English and yet another number for Spanish.

Can press 3 for Dari and press 4 for Pashto (the two official languages of Afghanistan) be in our future?

Inquiring minds want to know.

The news is populated with entertaining stories, almost as many as there are amusing animals in the Old MacDonald Had A Farm song.

Let’s marry the two.

AOC she has CO-VID.

E-I-E-I-O.

Went down south and flipped her lid.

E-I-E-I-O.

She went mask-less here, mask-less there.

Here no mask. There no mask. Everywhere no mask, mask.

AOC she has CO-VID.

E-I-E-I-O.

Hunter, Joe and Kazakhstan

E-I-E-I-O.

Making dough, they had a plan.

E-I-E-I-O.

’twas a photo op here, a photo op there.

Here an op. There an op. Everywhere an op, op.

Hunter, Joe and Kazakhstan

E-I-E-I-O.

Nancy P. will send you dough.

E-I-E-I-O.

To buy votes both to and fro.

E-I-E-I-O.

With a handout here and a handout there.

Here some pork. There some pork. Everywhere some pork, pork.

Nancy P. will send you dough.

E-I-E-I-O.

Chi-town teachers won’t attend.

E-I-E-I-O.

This demand they will not bend.

E-I-E-I-O.

With a virus scare here, a virus scare there.

Here a scare. There a scare. Everywhere a scare, scare.

Chi-town teachers won’t attend.

E-I-E-I-O.

Let me tell you about our neighborhood game that I call Parking Grab.

If ever it becomes a board game, Parker Brothers of Monopoly fame would be a natural to distribute it.

Until then, we must content ourselves with live-action Parking Grab.

There is no limit on players. The goal is to occupy the most on-street parking places with the fewest number of cars.

To spice up things, as in gymnastics or diving, a degree-of-difficulty factor can be introduced by factoring which households park the fewest percentage of their cars in driveways, garages or other off-street spaces.

For a long time I got my entertainment as a spectator. Now I’ve devolved into full-fledged participant.

This game was popular when I first moved into this neighborhood more than three decades back. Dedicated players included the people to my right, who were outraged if someone parked in “their” spot.

These are the same people who were put off when I asked them to move their car a tad so I could park a moving van and commence moving into my house.

Across the street at the time was a family with a wife I called Ann of a Thousand Parking Spaces. They had a garage, driveway and a pulloff spot in the alley behind the house. But Ann was particularly attracted to on-street parking, especially in the winter when someone had shoveled out their vehicle, left to run an errand and returned to find Ann’s car plunked in the spot.

But Ann and family moved, other players either died, moved away or lost interest and Parking Grab went on hiatus.

The game has experienced a rebirth in the past five years or so. I credit the people to my left.

The man of the house, at least that would be his assigned birth gender, accumulated vehicles through the years. A two-car garage was erected, but as far as I can tell, none of the family vehicles ever has been inside it.

A car could be parked along the side of the garage that faces the alley. A couple of cars could be parked in a gravel pulloff area beside it. But the family believes it has dibs on the street parking, too, of any number of spaces they should desire. Woe be to those who do not recognize this claim.

This became a problem one day a few years back when my son came to visit with his family and parked on the street. The neighbor raced out cursing at my son, a fact I was made aware of when one granddaughter burst into our house to get me.

My son’s sin? He’d parked on the street. IN FRONT OF MY HOUSE!!!!!!!!. It was raining fairly heavily at the time, so I went onto the porch to see what was up. The neighbor’s wife ran into my yard to scream at me.

I found it all amusing since she was getting drenched and I was under my porch roof.

The reaction of that family, when it was pointed out street parking was first-come, first-served, was to make sure to park all four of their vehicles (three cars and one sad blue truck) on the street for an extended period of time, often two of them in front of my house. When one vehicle left, others were pulled in ways to preserve the spot.

A side benefit of all this was convincing my wife that I was correct in long ago branding the folks as petty morons.

Fast forward to 2021/22 and I have accumulated five vehicles, although I’d never let one of my Mustangs parked unattended on the street. They spend most of their time in the garage, either the one at my house, or one I rent that is nearby.

But I do enjoy parking two of my wife’s cars in front of our house, using the old parking grab technique of letting half a car length between the front of Car No. 1 and a neighbor’s driveway and half a car length between Car No. 2 and Car No 1.

This creates great angst for the people two houses up, who have a rule that none of their visitors can park in front of their house.

It also plays havoc with the long list of poor drivers on this street who cannot parallel park and when their traditional resting spots required that rather simplistic skill, they were fond of seeking out the sometimes open spots in front of my house.

Those spots seldom are open these days.

Just yesterday, when I lent wife’s Car No. 2 to my son, a neighbor kid from across the street rushed out to plant his SUV in the vacated spot. It has not yet moved again. I think if I opened the door and listened, I could hear the victory celebration.

On my walk today, I saw one parking-impaired sort had pulled into a spot that the people two houses down consider their property. As I came back from the walk, that car had moved and the husband of the aggrieved family was rushing to clean off the wife’s car parked in an alley pulloff spot, which he promptly started and drove around the block to plant it in the vacated parking spot in front of his house.

The game has spread, like Omicron, to the people in the next block. Again while walking – last week — I saw a woman in a car pull up in front of a house and honk the horn vigorously. A half-dressed man rushed out, jumped into an SUV, and pulled out as she slid into the space.

He drove to the back of the property and pulled into a garage. Apparently he’d been a placeholder.

As mentioned earlier, I used to get my kicks just observing the Parking Grab phenomenon, recalling the saying of a high school friend to describe the players: Little things amuse little minds.

Alas, my mind now has shrunk, too, as I delight in playing the Parking Grab game my neighbors have taught me. Currently I’m indulging the idea of buying a couple of beater cars, just to have more pieces with which to play the game.

COVID hysteria has hit new highs (plumbed new depths, too) in recent days as a runny nose has become cause for alarm and quarantine.

Just today our area had its first measurable snowfall of the winter, and while temperatures have been warmer than usual for the most part this season, there have been some very cold days and nights.

For anyone who might be reading this in the tropics and has little firsthand knowledge of cold weather, it can cause one’s nose to run, a euphemism for when nostrils drip mucus.

Cold, dry air irritates the moist nasal linings, causing mucus glands to go into overdrive to compensate and some excess mucus tends to get expelled through your honker. It’s nothing that a tissue, or your coat sleeve, can’t handle. I’m just kidding about the coat sleeve.

The runny nose phenomenon was generally accepted as nature at work, at least pre-COVID. I recall that I took the SAT as a senior in high school with a severe cold, causing me to ram tissues up my nose to staunch the flow. Even at that, some excess mucus made it to the test sheet.

I scored quite well, but looking back I can’t be sure if it was me, or mucus filling in the correct answer bubbles.

These days, I’d have been barred from taking the test, denied my college entry certification, and sent home to stay in my room for days if not weeks.

Already this week, a neighbor was sent home from the hospital where she works because – horrors – her nose was running. A COVID test had to be taken and she was left to sit at home awaiting the results.

Supposedly if someone is detected with a runny nose there and doesn’t self-report it, they are open to vague punishment.

Turns out her runny nose was just a runny nose.

Meanwhile, one granddaughter was told at preschool she really should stay home if she has a runny nose. A four-year-old kid can have a runny nose on a cold day. Imagine that!

There were members of my extended family who as children had runny noses about 200 days a year. They sure would have missed a lot of school.

But how can we expect rational, informed thought from the lower echelons when a Supreme Court Justice, pondering whether or not Joe Biden can force COVID vaccines on people, misstated both statistics on the Omicron variation of COVID and flew in the face of just about all medical opinion when she said it is as deadly as the Delta variation?

Yes, critics say this woman is on the court largely to fill two affirmative action categories. But give us a break. Anyone paying even scant attention knows the consensus in the medical field is that Omicron is highly contagious, but not highly dangerous. Just two days ago WebMD reported Omicron hospitalizations run at about one-third of the Delta numbers.

And to present erroneous statistics to back up the fallacy that they are equals as health threats speaks to just how low our legal system has sunk.

The lesson here is that Covidiots and Maskholes are everywhere. So, if you have a runny nose, for God’s sake be sure to disguise that symptom lest you are required, ala Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” to be branded not with A for adulterer, but with RN (Runny Nose) and ostracized from polite company.

You’ve been warned.

While Joe Biden and friends try to distract from his failing regime by rewriting the history of Jan. 6, 2021, there’s a real insurrection going on in Kazakhstan.

You are forgiven if you were not aware of what’s happening in this ‘Stan because our lapdog media is too busy trying to prop up Biden with distortions of what happened the past Jan. 6 to report on it.

Fact: The only person actually killed on this date last year at the U.S. Capitol was an unarmed white woman protester who was shot by a skittish black Capitol policeman who feared for his life because this waif of a woman was reaching through a broken window.

Fact: Other deaths related to the Jan. 6, 2021, protest were heart attacks, an overdose, a stroke victim and several subsequent suicides by police officers and maybe others.

Fact: Kazakhstan officials admit to having dozens of anti-government protesters or police killed in their ongoing strife. Said protesters are reported to be armed – more heavily since breaking into a government armory. Banks are being looted. The sound of machine gun fire is heard. Threats are being issued on both sides of the dispute. This is an insurrection because it is not merely unarmed protesters breaching a government building. If that’s the standard, many Antifa and Black Lives Matter protests are insurrections, but curiously are not labeled as such.

Fact: Despite efforts of our usually AWOL vice president to emerge from hiding and paint Jan. 6, 2021, as Sept. 11 terror attacks and Pearl Harbor all rolled into one, the facts, as usual, don’t support her harangue. It is generally accepted that 2,996 people died from the Sept. 11 terror attacks, including 19 terrorists. Pearl Harbor had 2,403 U.S. casualties including 68 civilians. Go back to remedial math, Veep.

Fact: Hyperventilating left-wing media mouthpieces had been predicting a huge amount of carnage today as frustrated Trump supporters were expected to stage violent protests and dare we say it, insurrection. But such dire predictions have been found to be just more hyperbolic blather, on par with the Comet Kohoutek (1974) and Y2K (2000) hype that produced . . . nothing!

Fact: Why is Joe Biden even still president? As a candidate, during an October 2020 debate with President Trump, Biden cited 220,000 COVID deaths and held Trump responsible, saying Trump should not be president due to that. Well, more than 400,000 additional COVID deaths have been logged since Biden took over the Oval Office, so probably his irrational babbling today should have included his resignation.

Fact: Insurrection is not necessarily a bad thing, just like change isn’t necessarily a good thing despite it being sold as such by the Obama guy. Perhaps the protesters in Kazakhstan have legitimate grievances with their government that are not being addressed. I’m not sure. I do read that a rise in energy prices (sound familiar?) was the catalyst to ignite protests over long-term underlying issues such as human rights. What I do know, since I attended public schools at a time when history was still being taught, is this country was formed as a result of insurrection against England. But our Revolutionary War had many more casualties than one unarmed woman and thus legitimately could be labeled an insurrection.

Prediction: If the Democrats and their hodgepodge of socialist group lackeys want to keep pushing for insurrection, they just might get the real thing. See Kazakhstan.

The words of the day, the week, the month, the year, are Mass Formation Psychosis.

Mass Formation Psychosis is a phenomenon in which large parts of a society become fascinated by a leader and/or idea, fixated on them, and thus are able to be led in directions with little basis in reality.

Dr. Robert Malone used the term on a recent podcast with Joe Rogan that basically got the good doctor’s Twitter account shut down. Rogan didn’t escape unscathed, having the interview removed from YouTube and Twitter.

Dr. Malone likened our COVID hysteria, and the governments that are taking advantage of the situation to push the bounds of what infringements on basic rights the people will accept under the guise of fighting the virus, to the sorrow of Nazi Germany.

For the younger crowd who no longer are taught history, Nazi Germany was a chilling example in which many otherwise decent people bought into the ravings of Adolf Hitler and either accepted or ignored atrocities committed at his behest.

Flash forward to recent video of the woman passenger on an airplane screaming at, and assaulting, an elderly gent for taking down his face mask inflight in order to eat. Even as this woman bellowed at the guy, her mask was nowhere near deployed over her mouth and nose, instead looking like a support bra for her chin.

Why was this woman acting out like this? Because she’s bought into the COVID fear cult. We’re all going to die unless everyone gets vaccinated, boosted regularly, and wears multiple masks while observing social distancing and general isolation.

In her mind, the man trying to eat his meal on that plane was no better than a suicide bomber playing with the lives of all onboard.

Why someone so inclined felt the need to get on an airplane at all is an unanswerable contradiction, but not an uncommon one.

There also has been a report since of a Michigan woman flying from Chicago to Iceland who felt some throat discomfort, rushed to the bathroom with a rapid COVID test she just happened to have along, tested positive, and confined herself in the lavatory for five hours of the flight to save the rest of the passengers from certain death (not to mention making it more difficult to relieve themselves).

Could it be she just wanted some attention? Repeated video updates by her suggest so.

She also claims to have been fully vaccinated and updated with boosters. I’m betting she will survive, just like about 99.6 percent of all COVID sufferers.

There are reports that searches for Mass Formation Psychosis have skyrocketed after Dr. Malone’s Rogan podcast and Google has done one of its absolutely non-political, just-looking-out-for-you adjustments to search results to highlight attempts to debunk Dr. Malone’s take on our world and the COVID fear merchants.

I checked for myself. Upon using Google to search for “Mass Formation Psychosis” one is directed to LameStream media attempts to debunk Malone.

Type the same “Mass Formation Psychosis” into duckduckgo.com, the non-tracking, apolitical search engine, and the first hit you get is a generic discussion of the syndrome and application to investing. The big debunking attempts don’t make it to the top five of search results.

This selective search manipulation, along with the rise of “fact” checkers who would be more at home in the ministry of propaganda, hints that the ideas they try so hard to suppress just might have more than a smidgen of truth to them.

William Shakespeare identified the phenomenon long before the digital age in his play “Hamlet” with the line “the lady doth protest too much.” General meaning: When the denials become too fervent, often the opposite is true.

Already governments of the United Kingdom and Canada have been forced to admit intentionally overselling fear in trying to steer the unwilling members of the populace to COVID vaccinations.

If you think the United States isn’t just as guilty of this, you are extremely Pollyannish.

And lest you think Mass Formation Psychosis is a fairy tale, consider the example of Biden voters who still think they picked the right man for the job.

‘Nuff said.

If you bother to look beyond the hype, past the overselling of tradition and the outright propaganda issued by vested interests such as those broadcasting the games, the four-team playoff system for the Division I national championship has neutered all the other bowls.

Whatever the flower, fruit, or corporate sponsor in their names, these outsider games all have become toilet bowls. Time just to flush them.

The best and brightest players opt out of the lesser-echelon games, meaning they don’t play in bowl games that are not in the playoff system lest they get injured and cost themselves some money when they try to move on to the pro ranks.

Presumably they don’t think they can get injured playing for a championship.

Matt Corral, the Ole Miss quarterback and likely NFL first-round draft pick, stood out by opting to play with his team in the Sugar Bowl – not one of the championship bowl games this year. And, just to add fuel to the fire, Corral had to be carted off the field early in the game with an ankle injury and did not return.

Fortunately for Corral, X rays were negative and according to reports the injury should not affect his draft stock.

But that hasn’t stopped the social media Monday Morning Morons from using Corral’s misfortune to lampoon critics of opt-out players. Notable among that group of critics is ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit, who questioned the love of the game of those opting out.

Fellow ESPN analyst Desmond Howard also was critical of the opt-out players.

The way I see it, this trend to opt out has helped to strip away the already thin student-athlete nonsense when we’re talking big-time college football.

The better college football programs serve as semi-pro leagues for the NFL, or CFL.

It can be argued that the colleges and NCAA take financial advantage of the players in this setup.

It also can be argued that many players take advantage of their colleges, pitting them against each other in the recruiting process and expecting to be treated like royalty when they hit the campus. Yet these players reserve the right to cut and run should they get an attitude cramp.

Let us deal with the reality of the situation. For all the corny crap about living or dying for Old State, how there’s no I in team, or about teams being one huge family, the reality is too large a percentage of players are lone rangers.

They do what is good for them and if it happens to help the team, too, well that’s just serendipity.

It’s not just the opting out that has removed that student-athlete illusion. The so-called transfer portal has become an eight-lane highway allowing disgruntled players to leave for theoretically greener pastures without losing any time.

Let me emphasize, I’ve got no problem with players looking out for themselves. I merely want all involved to be upfront and honest about it.

Moving forward, players, coaches and media should spare us the syrupy tributes to college football using buzzwords such as tradition, loyalty, teamwork.

Paint the players with the appropriate brush of mercenary self-interest and leave it at that.

And, please, let us get rid of maybe 25 or 30 bowl games so we have that many fewer chances for the self-interested to strut their indifference to their team and game by opting out of bowls.

The year 2021 is down to its last gasp and we can only hope 2022 is better, both than this year and the previous example.

Getting COVID hysteria under control would be a start. A competent person in the White House would be a boost, too, although that’s not possible any time soon.

Regardless, here’s a little True-False quiz for you from headlines in the waning days of 2021 as a reminder of how ridiculous this year had been.

True or false, the much ballyhooed Jan. 6 “insurrection” was a planned coup attempt by angry Trump supporters and various right-wing groups.

False. Despite the ongoing narrative, a Reuters report way back in August, citing an FBI source, said the protesters had been found to be almost entirely people acting on their own without any kind of centralized planning.

True or false, despite rising energy prices, particularly for oil, discovery of new reserves was at a 75-year low in 2021.

True. According to a story on QZ.com citing the Rystad Energy firm, the search for fossil fuels has suffered a large decrease in funding, no doubt owing to the clean energy maniacs led by the likes of Sweden’s Rain Girl. Expect prices of gasoline and natural gas to rise in 2022, both here and abroad. Thank AOC and her Green New Deal friends for this.

True or false, the New York State Health Department, in a memo setting priority standards for doling out anti-virus medications, has included being “nonwhite” in a list of more traditional risk factors such as diabetes or cancer that would give an individual preference to receive the drugs.

True. Black Lives Matter types would be so pleased. Can a White Lives Matter group be anticipated?

True or false, using the IRS as its collection agency, the cash-strapped United States is calling on criminals to report income from theft or various illegal activities such as dealing drugs on their 1040 tax forms.

True. As reported by the New York Post, the IRS even specified such income from illegal activities could be reported on Schedule 1, Line 8Z or on Schedule C. So, crime does pay, but the IRS still wants its cut.

True or false, in a rare triumph of facts over propaganda, virus demigod Tony Fauci admitted during a Thursday appearance on his MSNBC cable soapbox that most so-called hospitalizations of children with COVID, are not due to COVID.

True. Mentioning a broken leg, appendicitis or similar issues, Fauci said kids entering the hospital for treatment for those conditions are automatically tested for COVID and if they come back positive, they are listed as a COVID hospitalization. That, in a nutshell, speaks to the statistical manipulation that has been employed to make COVID numbers look worse then they actually are. This has continued despite ample evidence that the current Omicron variation is on par with the common cold.

Goodbye 2021. You were a joke of a year that ended true to form.

I read that an MSNBC lack of personality snowflake is outraged because a citizen said “Let’s Go Brandon” to Joe Biden on a phone call.

From this she has extrapolated that it’s all part of an ongoing insurrection against a sitting president.

I wonder if she was as outraged when the FBI, the LameStream media, members of Congress, a presidential election opponent and a cast of thousands of entrenched bureaucrats conspired to gin up a Russian conspiracy in the attempt to discredit and remove a sitting president named Trump?

The Let’s Go Brandon meme arose from fans at an auto race chanting “F— Joe Biden” as a post-race interview was being conducted on track with the winner, a guy named Brandon.

The twit holding the microphone could have ignored it all. Could have expressed dismay. Could have spoken louder.

Instead, she did what too many media members do these days, twisted it into something it obviously was not, saying the crowd was chanting “Let’s go Brandon.”

And a meme was born.

Understand that it was painfully obvious she was not reporting accurately. But, again, accuracy these days plays second fiddle to messaging.

A common ongoing media theme is to speak with horror of Jan. 6 and the so-called attack on democracy in this country.

Let us recount that for all the participants in this incident, the only person who died from violence was an unarmed female protester who was shot for the high crime of reaching through a broken window.

One policeman died – not from being hit on the head with a fire extinguisher as was widely reported – but instead from a pair of strokes.

Two protest participants died from heart attacks.

One died from what was first reported as being trampled but later was changed to an “accidental” overdose.

There have been four suicides since among police officers.

All the above has been gleaned from factcheck.org, not exactly a right-wing operation.

This hasn’t stopped political opportunist and math-challenged socialist (aren’t they all?) AOC from proclaiming that it was a terror attack with “almost 10 dead.”

What is “almost dead.” Or can this lefist figurehead not count to 8, 9, or 10? How did she ever make correct change in her bartender days?

The blame for some of this overblown insurrection chatter owes to the lack of history being taught in our schools.

Instead of poisoning minds with tales of Adam and Steve, they might remind the young ‘uns that this country was born of an insurrection, against a British government that actually was less intrusive and controlling than our current regime. You can look it up!

The current populace is restive as prices go up daily, leftist lame-brained legislation is attempted to be rammed through, virus overkill has become a never-ending power grab, and parents are being told to sit down and shut up if they don’t want their kids indoctrinated instead of instructed.

A man using the Let’s Go Brandon meme is not insurrection. Neither was the Jan. 6 protest.

But, if government and media continue to attempt lead us down this path of unquestioning subservience, an actual insurrection is an outcome for which they should start planning.

Let’s Go Brandon!

Call it the Burger King Christmas miracle. A stranger bought lunch for me and the wife today.

It happened not on 34^th Street, but in the drive-through lane at the Westwood BK, which I’d occupied for maybe 10 minutes thanks to an unlikely rush at 2:30 p.m.

No problem. I’m a new, more patient guy these days and I’d promised to bring home something for us to eat since my wife was about to make more cookies – she’s always making cookies!

When it finally was my turn to yell into the ordering microphone, I asked for two chicken parmigiana sandwiches. This puzzled the guy. Memo to self: Got to call it Italian chicken sandwich in the future.

The rest of the order was made without difficulty.

But it was me who was soon to be the puzzled one. As I reached the pay window, money in hand, the pleasant woman there told me there was no charge, the woman in the car ahead of me had paid for my order.

I was temporarily speechless, a condition I’ve heard about but am not really familiar with firsthand. As I stammered, the woman continued it was a pay-it-forward gesture.

Although definitions vary, basically the pay-it-forward philosophy is if you are the beneficiary of a good deed, you should gift another with a similar act. They do the same. Wash, rinse, repeat.

The employee volunteered that it happened more than you’d believe and she thinks it’s a really nice gesture. “Your lunch is free today,” she said.

Because I’m wired the way I am, my mind raced for context.

It would have been nice to have thanked the woman, but she and her Cadillac were long-gone.

I also would have liked to have known if perhaps she had taken pity on me due to me driving the wife’s older, rusted Ford Focus, not her pristine, low-mileage Pontiac Grand Prix GT. Plus, I’m old. So it could be the woman figured I could really use some economic relief.

Pondering the matter further, I speculated that this could be a karmic response to the wife’s generosity. As mentioned earlier, she bakes a lot of cookies, particularly for Christmas although this latest batch is for a party.

Regardless, Christmas cookie platters are widely dispensed to friends and family, not to mention neighbors on our street who act civilly toward us.

Cookie platters and other assorted sweets also are highlights of a union Christmas party we attend, where they are offered as raffle prizes.

As I’ve told my wife often, she’s a much better person than I am. It could be that by me offering to bring home something to eat, I indirectly benefited from her generosity with cookies and the like.

She’s the kind of person who once gave a bouquet of flowers to a little girl who was helping her dad shop for groceries because the mother was ill. My wife had noticed the father and the girl often in the store and felt obliged to acknowledge the girl’s actions.

So, perhaps for those acts, or due to other reasons I cannot call to mind readily, we got the proverbial free lunch today. At least it was free to us.