Exiting the Passenger Side, Even Though You Drove

I went to the grocery store on Sunday. That was dumb. Apparently everyone else in California needed to go to the store at exactly the same time. I had never been gridlocked in the bread aisle before, and it was quite a strange sensation. I had to override my claustrophobic driven urge to ram everyone with my cart.

Screaming children were EVERYWHERE. I heard, well, we all heard one parent yelling "Is it because you don't want to go to the birthday party? IS THAT IT? IS THAT WHY YOU ARE DOING THIS TO ME??" It was like watching synchronized swimming as we all decided whether we would be the people to act like the ruckus wasn't there, or we would be the people to stare directly into it.

At one point I found myself in an aisle alone. I was grateful for the space. And then the world decided to punch me in the face with a situation that happened far too fast for photo documentation. My own photos. As I'm positive security cameras caught it.

I was about to wheel my cart further down the aisle when an elderly man carrying something began walking towards me. My head began to calculate where he would be going, as we all do when there's another person in a space we need to navigate. I hadn't started moving yet because I felt like he was heading right for me. I remember thinking that was not possible, but then he came up to my cart and dropped the item he was carrying in it. He then looked up at me and I know all he saw was a strange lady staring back at him with her jaw riding in that built in kid seat shopping carts have. I wasn't sure WHAT to do. But then he literally clicked into the realization that my cart was not the cart he was looking for. He grabbed his items, practically yelled "I'm sorry" at me and then literally RAN AWAY.

I didn't see him the rest of the time I was in the store. I really wanted to. I wanted to see that he was with someone that perhaps looked like me and he just mistook my cart/me as that person. That maybe he had left her there while he retrieved something and that is why he thought I was her. What gave me the punched in the face sensation was that I was afraid he was having elderly dementia issues and I had witnessed an episode. And acted oh so gracefully as to stand there with a look of shock on my face. I really really wanted that not to be the case.

Just like I really really wanted the spider that was on my truck to be gone by the time I got out of the grocery store. Mr. Spider had built a web on my side view mirror, driver's side. I had driven on the freeway in order to blow him and his web off the truck, but it didn't work. And when I got off the freeway, Mr. Spider would come out of the center of the web to crawl up the driver's side window at stop lights. It's really not safe to drive a vehicle around while fighting the wibblies and saying "ew ew ew ew ew ew ew". When I arrived at the grocery store I exited my truck through the passenger side. I made some guy who parked 2 spaces away from me raise his eyebrows when he saw me climb over the center console to get out on the passenger side. I had to do all my business that day out of the passenger side. For all I know, the spider and his web are still there. Mr. Zoom drove us to work today.

I really hope the elderly man from the store had a spider like reason for placing his item in my cart.