Dear Blogosphere,
Look, here's the situation. I'm going to be straight with you. This blog post is the result of a Meijer outing that inspired such a brilliant blog
title, that I had no choice but to write the blog post to go with it.
This past Thursday, on my lunch break, I decided to go to Meijer to take a break from my desk, walk around a little bit, and maybe pick up a couple grocery items. I parked the car near the non-grocery entrance, and hurried in, with my scarf and jacket wrapped tightly around me. I began browsing the greeting card section first, then made my way over to the Christmas decorations and ornaments. Suddenly, I heard a loud, whiny child's voice. And then I heard the voice of a distressed sounding mom-- the kind of mom who you know bribes her children. Weird.
The child's voice got louder and whinier over the next minute or so, and the mom's "Stop crying, what do you want? I will buy you candy. What do you want? Stop this. Do you want more candy? How about this kind of chocolate? What do you want? Stop now. I will buy you this. And this? Stop. What do you--" grew increasingly desperate.
I have encountered whiny babies before. It's pretty unfortunate when you run into them in public spaces. You know, the kind of children that stomp their feet and cry real tears and scream bloody murder and thrash around on the floor. Worst.
BUT THIS TIME. For some reason, I was feeling extra annoyed and irritable. I think it's because usually, when babies start to freak the freak out, their parents will make
some sort of attempt to end the nonsense. They might yell at them, threaten them, pick them up, or at the very least, attempt to hurry up with picking through all the tomatoes so that they can pay and get out of the store as soon as possible before they start getting dirty, judgmental looks from other customers. This mother did none of those things. She just kept muttering to them and then proceeded to slowly--
so slowly-- push her shopping cart up and down every aisle, stopping to examine jewelry, and books, and flower pots, and candles, and oh yeah-- candy bars. I tried to walk away from the crying children, but they.. followed me. Everywhere I went, I could hear that this lady was pushing her cart not far behind me. Finally, we intersected. I looked into the cart, and there were two babies! Twins, actually. Twin girls. And they were kind of ugly. I thought to myself,
"Oh, please. You two aren't nearly cute enough to get away with this."
I called my mom at this point to ask her if Felix and I were like those nasty kids when we were in public places when we were young. She assured me that we were not. I felt better.
Then, I walked over to the bakery section of the store to pick out some bread. Next to the bread baskets, I saw an old grandma buying bagels. She was standing in front of the bagel display, propping the glass door open with her back. She had a paper bag in her left hand, and an insufficiently small piece of wax paper in her right. I watched her run her wrinkly hand over every single bagel in that glass case. Every single one. Gross. And then, when she reached the bottom shelf, she stroked the last bagel, and then she took it and slipped it into her coat pocket.
I guess she didn't realize that the glass door she was hiding behind was transparent.
I felt so strange after seeing that! I felt kind of annoyed and angry and confused, but also really, really found it hilarious. What do I do? What do you do? What does anybody do? I thought about tapping her on the shoulder and being all,
"Excuse me, I see what you did there," but I was afraid I'd give her a heart attack. And since my CPR/First Aid certification hasn't been renewed for this year, I decided against it.
Thieving grandma tried to steal some cookies afterwards too, but I deterred her by going up to the same cookie table she was inspecting and standing really really close to her. Right next to her, actually. Close enough to smell the stolen bagel. Sick. When I had approached the cookie table, she was trying to pry one of the container lids off; I so startled her that she dropped the container, and knocked a few other containers off the table, too. Her guilt betrayed her. I helped her pick up the containers, and then I just stood reading cookie labels until she left. I was a hero that day. Or at least half of a hero. And Meijer will never know.
- bcl.
