Clean up in the Aisle to Hell

There’s a stomach flu going around.  Almost everyone I know seems to have had it—except me.  But I’m not feeling so great today.  I took my lunch hour at the end of the work day (a perk of working for family) and went home, took a nap.

Then I figured I should probably get myself something to eat.  Something bland.  Something easy.  Chicken soup.

Of course I have no chicken soup because normally I make homemade chicken soup.  However, when you’re feeling a little queasy and a little drained, you just don’t feel like making chicken soup from scratch.  My mother suggested I go out to Panera Bread and get some from there.  My neighbor suggested I go around the corner to the little home owned place and see what their soups were.

But, I decided I was going to the grocery store.

Brilliant.

First off, let me say that at 6:15pm all you people with school age kids should be at home having dinner and finishing homework and settling down for school tomorrow.  Those of you with preschool kids—the same.  Old people, well let’s face it:  this time of year it’s dark out at 6:15 and you really shouldn’t be on the roads.

Oh, yeah, old people, get on me for that comment.  On my way to Meijer’s a woman in the turn lane went straight and nearly killed me.  She had a big huge Cadillac Escalade with a blue handicapped parking pass hanging from the rearview.  She looked shocked when I slammed on my brakes just before turning into her path, her face lit up like the Grand Canyon at dusk by the glow of the new Cinemark Theatre sign.  (get it, Grand Canyon, wrinkles in a person’s face…that’s my artistic side coming out right there).  She had a quizzical look on her face like, “Oh my, that woman in that tiny little car nearly turned right in front of me without looking.”  She’ll probably go home and call her friends and tell them about the horrible night adventure she had and the little blue car who’s stupid driver nearly got flattened; like it was my fault.  Like it’s perfectly okay to drive straight when the little green arrow is pointing left.  This is why we have road rage, by the way, but that’s a theory for another night.

I get to the parking lot to find it PACKED.  Cars popping out of aisles, fighting over spaces.  Someone screaming at me because they couldn’t get into a space fast enough and someone came from the opposite direction and got the one they had their eye on from 50 yards out.  I parked far away from the crazies and hurried in...for 1 can of chicken noodle soup.

To say the outside parking lot was packed truly gives no justice to the chaos inside.  Two twenty-something guys jumped in front of me to make sure they grabbed a cart.  Who says chivalry isn’t dead?  I manage to weave my way through the crowds stopped right in front of the door to arrange their kids and their purses in the carts before setting off to shop.

I walk down the main corridor at the ends of the grocery aisles.  I need aisle 11—soup.

At aisle 3, frozen foods, I’m tackled.  Two kids have leapt out of the ice cream and garlic bread in front of me.  I collide with a small, old woman who can barely see over the cart.  She slips out of her furry purple slippers and falls into a display of 75% off candy canes.  The candy canes smash when they hit the ground into peppermint flavored dust and skitter across the other side of the corridor where a woman tries to run her cart over them, but ends up cussing because “What the hell is under this damn wheel of this damn cart?”  The mother of the two kids looks up—briefly—from the frozen pizzas and says, “Boys, stay out of the way now.”

I put my head down and keep moving forward.  Clearly, that’s the only way.  At aisle 5, ethnic foods, I find an abandoned cart blocking one side of the corridor and two women talking on the other side.  One of the women looks up as she continues her leisurely chat in front of generic refried beans and makes eye contact with me.  Her eyes say, “I’m not moving and we’re here for a while.”  I can see the flow of traffic has been diverted between the Pepsi and the Christmas ale into oncoming traffic as other shoppers avoid this roadblock.  I plunge into the fray and nearly have a head-on collision with a severely obese man driving a go-cart.  He’s wearing goggles, has a nitrogen tank strapped to the back of his scooter/go-cart.  I have to step onto a wooden palette to avoid my second collision of the night.

Finally I make it to aisle 11.  Which is clogged with people manhandling the soup—10 cans for $1.  A split pea admirer has her cart in front of the chicken noodle.  “Excuse me,” I say, “can I just grab a can of—“

“Wait your turn!” she snaps in a voice that cannot be her own.  I am suddenly reminded of Linda Blair in The Exorcist and the split pea soup they used for special effects.  I take a step back.  I wait my turn even as my stomach whines and my gut starts to crap.  I’m really not feeling well.

I get my one can of soup.  I weave my way through jewelry and baby clothes.  It’s like a back road of serenity to the check out lines.  There are four lanes open.  Four.  Normally this would be okay for 6:30 on a Monday night.  I mean, this is when the single people without families are supposed to come out and get their stuff done in peace and quite.  Not tonight though.

I pick a line.  It doesn’t matter which one.  They’re all slow and everyone in front of me has a cart full.

I clutch my one can of soup and close my eyes for a moment to dream of an “express lane” where the store doesn’t put their slowest clerk, where people can count and know that if they have more than 10 items (without bundling things up and saying, “well the boloney goes on the bread for sandwiches, so that’s really one item”) they have to go to another lane.  I can hear kids screaming, parents threatening, a possible case of child abuse in Lane 3.

The old lady in front of me has forty cans of soup.  She lays them on the conveyor belt one-by-one, straining to reach them out of the cart. 

I must have sighed because she stopped and looked at me.

As our eyes met, I recognized her from the Escalade.  I can’t tell you how she beat me here or what twist of time and space allowed her to load up with soup before I got my single can.  But it was her.  I saw recognition in her eyes too;  they widened, their watery, cataract blue magnified behind thick glasses.  “You!” she said in a hard, harsh voice full of accusations, just as I’d suspected.  I hear a snort behind me.  The woman in the purple fuzzy slippers is standing there with her hands on her hips, there’s nothing but cold hatred in her eyes.  It’s gang night at Meijer!  Shit (which with each twist of my intestines is becoming more of a possibility if you know what I mean.)

I glare at them and realize I've got nothing to lose but my lunch.  I grip my can in one hand and lift it above my shoulder  “Listen, I’m going to buy this can of soup and I'm gonna do it before either of you get your stuff.  If either of you say a word, I’m gonna puke on your groceries and beat you to death with those slippers.”