In an effort to not make this blog so damn depressing with my whining that things aren't moving fast enough (or so I've been told) maybe this little anecdote will lighten the mood:
Last week, maybe it was a Wednesday, Jill and I were at the local supermarket doing our bi-weekly shopping.
I tend to do this shopping on my own, as a rule. I know where just about everything we need is, and like some sort of surgical special ops team, I'm in, out, mission complete in usually under an hour. But with Jill in tow, things were going to move slightly slower.
Every aisle I went down, Jill would be dawdling behind me, diddling her phone. At one point I lost her completely.
It was then, in the cereal aisle, that I came across this little immigrant woman, no taller than maybe the desk I'm writing on, staring intently at all the choices of hot cereal the store had to offer.
She would pick up a box, examine it through her large, bug-like eyeglasses, then decide it wasn't the right one, and set it back on the shelf. She did this for maybe five evolutions, picking up different styles and brands of hot cereal and oatmeal, not settling on one in particular.
She was also standing with her cart directly blocking the display of Cream of Wheat.
So there I stood, behind her, but not so behind her that I was in her blind spot, leaning on my shopping cart, trying to be patient. Not another soul around for aisles.
In most situations like these, I'd have no problem being like "excuse me, Ms. I'm going to just reach around here and ..... yeeeah, thanks...." and walk away undeterred.
But based off of smell alone, this woman struck me as maybe being a gypsy. And we all know gypsies can cast curses. No thank you.
By now, Jill's finally caught up to me. She looks at me, then at the tiny maybe-gypsy-woman and back to me.
"What's going on?" She asks loud enough for it to be heard conversationally.
"I'm just looking for the Cream of Wheat" I tell her in a way to indicate that I'm more or less waiting for this woman to move out of the way. In any normal situation, the woman would realize she was blocking the product I was waiting for, turn and smile, and gently push her cart out of the way.
This gypsy simply turned and smiled. So Jill and I both stood and waited.
After about another minute goes by and I'm just of the mind set to be like "fuck it, I don't need Cream of Wheat this badly," and I start to push my cart away. The gypsy speaks.
"I'm looking vor this particular brand of oatmeal..." she says with a heavy former Eastern Bloc accent that I put somewhere between Croatian and Belorussian. Something made me stop dead in my tracks and stand for a second. I don't know if it was her voice or what, but I was frozen in place.
Bluddy gypsy curse....
"It vas veddy good..." she says in a comically evil sorta way, "but I cannot vind it, again," she pulls down a small box of some all-organic product. "I think this vas the fun..." she trails off. Her ancient gnarled fingers wrapped around the box, holding it up for my inspection.
At the same time I could see Old Mr. Shaw... the name I have always associated with the friendly faced black guy on the box of Cream of Wheat, smiling up at me. "C'mon Missa Jack, bring good ol' Missa Shaw homeswitcha!" He said in a probably racist voice in my head. But this other foreign product was being pushed into my hands by the same witch that likely poisoned Snow White.
....And if memory serves me correctly, wasn't that witch Snow White's mom? ....That's fucked up.
Anyway, as if in a trance, I hear myself saying "sure, I'll try this out," and taking the box from her. I turn, walking out of the aisle, pushing my cart ahead of me. I'm 100% aware of the weird look I'm getting from Jill, when I freeze in my tracks again.
"Vait, sir... sir" the gypsy calls me from the opposite end of a deep well. "That is not the right fun...." I turn on my heals and walk back to her and exchange boxes. Now I'm walking away with a different box of hot cereal that I don't want.
A few days later I finally try the stuff out. It's horrible. The brand is called "Raw" and it tastes as if the Cinnamon Fairy just took a hatred-filled vengeful dump in your mouth while you're sleeping off a bad drunk. I only had two spoonfuls of the stuff; the first was to try it, and I retched. The second, was to make sure the first spoonful was truly as bad as I thought. It was.
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