Just to get something off my chest ...

I answered the door yesterday to a solicitor. It was a young kid trying to get "points" so he could go on a trip to Hawaii and Rome. I could tell by his smooth talk and trying to get me to give him high-fives and the way he stumbled when I didn't respond the way he wanted me to that he was going on a script. I made excuses to go, "I've got to make dinner ... I don't want to keep the door open, we're letting in flies ... I'm not interested ..."

He said my neighbor (motioning towards the other half of our house, where a single lady lives) had sent him over and said, "He's a nice guy ..." So now I knew he was lying to my face. I tried again to get him to leave when he showed me a list of magazines, "I'm not interested in buying any magazines ..." At which point he said, "Who said anything about buying them? I just asked you to look! I'm not asking you to give me any money." (As if that wasn't where he was going with it - sure, I give money to the magazine, but then they send him off on his trip to Rome, so what's the difference?)

"I'm not interested!" I said, and I would have slammed the door, but for my two girls who were standing in the doorway.

And now for what's really bugging me about it: Then he said, "Oh, is it because I'm a black man? I make you nervous?"

Seething and foaming at the mouth ensued. I can't believe the gall of the boy, to use race to sell his magazines to someone who has already shown she didn't want them. In essence, he said, "Well, if you don't buy a magazine from me, it's because you're racist."

I've come up with a dozen responses I should have said, my favorite being, "What kind of a question is that? Are you intimidated by me because I'm white?" What I actually did was say, "No, I just don't want to buy your magazines, Get in the house, girls!" and shut the door as quickly as I could (Which was not very quickly, because I had to pull each of the girls individually out of the way).

Anyway, here's hoping I can stop seething now ...