Driven, but not too far
House on Red Corner · 2005-10-24
It’s really amazing how things work. One minute we can be living our life, just walking around being happy and the very next, we can be gripped with fear. Not even fear of anything really dangerous or scary, just plain ordinary fear. Like today, Squeaky and I saddled up and rode over to the supermarket. On the way we dropped off the family’s laundry at the laudromat.
When we get to the supermarket, we run into a bit of a traffic jam getting in the door. There are two old ladies at the front of the queue up, one pushing a cart and the other holding onto the cart, sort of a walker on wheels for two if you will. They had stopped to get one of the little baskets that the supermarket supplies to do your shopping, and there was a woman behind them with her SUV of laudry carts who was completely unable to get around them. This forced El Squeakazoid and I to stand outside and wait for the two hundred and forty years of human ingenuity standing in our way, to move.
Once we got into the grocery store, I whipped out my trusty Hipster PDA (the one with the wallet extension) and began a search and destroy mission to fill our cart in reverse order. We were thinking about how we were going to pack the cart after the checkout, so the things we found first were the things we wanted on top when we left. This meant that we were not following the ‘normal’ shopping path of the floor plan (starting in produce and weaving up and down the aisles until yo arrive in the dairy section.) This also meant that we were in some aisles more than once.
\*\*\*NOTE: There is no choice paper or plastic in New York, it's all plastic, and plastic bags reproduce faster than rabbits in Australia, because they have no natural predators. So, I do this to prevent having to use any bags whatsoever, and thereby saving space for us to live in our apartment
It was after happily singing along to some obscure hit from the ’70s and passing the old lady couple for teh second time, that I got gripped with fear. Fear taht I was going to get unsoliciated advice. That is something that New Yorkers really do not mind giving away, they seem to have an overabundance of it. So I was preparing myself to respond to anything that came my way; comments about “how nice it was that I was able to shop for things on a list my wife made for me” or “how nice it is that I give the mother a break on my day off” or something else of this sort of nature. Nothing that I could think of responding with was nice. Fortunately no one said anything to me besides “Aw, how cute.”
EJ was cranky in the afternoon because her second tooth broke skin today.