April 17 – “Supermarket Ticket?”

Chris let me out of my cage once again for my weekly trip to Randall’s.  Here’s hoping the frequency of road trips increases very soon.  This time she had a prescription waiting.  We also needed bread and bananas and milk and toothpaste.  The toothpaste was for Chris.  She likes the gel kind.  That stuff makes my whole mouth rebel.  For some reason it reminds me of the bubble gum I used to get when I bought a pack of baseball cards.  Of course I would chew five or six sticks at once.  Ever since I have a hard time even smelling bubble gum in any form.  What that has to do with gel toothpaste, I have no idea.  But then I have often been accused of having numerous misfires and short circuits in my brain.  It’s probably just one of them rearing its ugly head. 

The memorable event of this trip, however, came on the inside of the store.  Oh, most people inside were wearing their masks.  Most in fact were wearing them correctly, so there was that.  I didn’t see an infraction of the mask rule until I got back outside.  Old folks’ time was over, and one of the YI’s (Young and Indestructibles) was on his way inside to terrorize unsuspecting shoppers.  But speaking of infractions, one of them was the fun experience of the day.  As I was in line to check out and the lady reached for my bananas, she saw something over my shoulder that caused her to leap into action.  “Sir!  Sir!” she cried.  I glanced back and saw the elderly gentleman stop dead in his tracks.  He instinctively checked his mask.  No, that was not it.  Puzzled, he looked around for the source of the voice, hidden, of course by the checker’s own mask and somewhat muffled by the plexiglass partition.  Realizing she had his attention, she loudly explained, “You’re going the wrong way down that aisle.”  Ah, yes.  The infamous one-way aisles I discovered on my last trip into the supermarket world.  It was clear that he was going to get off with a warning rather than a ticket this time, so I called out in encouragement, “Just turn your basket around and back down the aisle.  That’s what I did.”  True statement, there, by the way.  Always face the correct direction.  Letter of the law and all that.  He mumbled something about wrong ways and backing up and strange new things to deal with, but he also chuckled a bit and tossed a wave at us as he proceeded on to the correct aisle.  See you on the flip aisle, my friend.  May you ever avoid being hit with a Supermarket Ticket.

Isaiah 25:8 says, “he will swallow up death forever.  The Sovereign Lord will wipe away the tears from all faces; he will remove his people’s disgrace from all the earth.  The Lord has spoken.”

Father, watch over that guy I indirectly met in Randall’s yesterday.  Help him - and all of us - with “new things.”  Amen.