Monday September 2, 2019
This is a true story….
My family recently stopped by the Super Target in Vernon Hills, Illinois and had the equivalent of a religious experience. Okay, not that kind of experience – it’s not like I saw Jesus in a Mossimo tote or ran across St. Francis, deep in thought in the pet food aisle. But it was a mind-altering experience that has ruined me for any Target experience ever.
The whole story was shiny. Like, polished diamonds in a platinum setting under a disco ball while your husband shines an LED flashlight directly into your eyes, shiny. Everything gleamed like the surface of the sun and the displays looked like they had never been touched by human hands.
My son grabbed a cart and pushed it as we headed off to find the frozen snacks Jack wanted for his dorm freezer – none of which had any nutritional value whatever and in fact, probably doesn’t even qualify as actual food.
At one point, Jack handed the cart over to me and I pushed it. I froze. It was like lightly touching a weightless hovercraft, gliding over still waters.
To put this into the proper perspective – I’m the one who always gets the bum cart at the supermarket. If it has a wonky wheel, squeaks or is rusty and lethal – that’s the cart I get. If shopping carts could time travel, the ones I seem to always pick would take me to a slaughterhouse in a 1950’s Soviet gulag, every damn time.
But this! This cart was silent and felt like it was silently propelling itself over the glass-like surface of those shiny floors as angels sang and someone handed me a free pint of Ben and Jerry’ ice cream that had 0 calories.
I asked Jack’s friend Gabrielle to push the cart. She looked at me with that look Millennials always give middle-aged people with a touch of early onset dementia. But she took control of the cart to humor me. A look of beatific glee came over her face and she said, “From here on out, no one pushes this cart but me! I will fight you.”
Jack wondered what the big deal was – but then, this was probably the first time in his 19-year existence that he ever pushed a cart through a store.
When my husband caught up with me in an elegantly designed rounded-corner display (they had rounded corners!) of artfully arranged arts and crafts, I asked him to push the cart. He gave me that look middle-aged men give their middle-aged menopause-addled wives, before grabbing the cart.
“What?” He cried out. “How is this possible? Is it even touching the floor? This defies the Laws of Physics!”
And that was all we talked about for the rest of our time there.
When we got back home, we stopped at a grocery store to pick up a couple of things. The cart squealed like it was being tortured by demons with Tourette’s in Hell. Then it hit some sort of invisible pebble and skidded for a second, painfully bruising my hands.
“We’ll always have the Super Target in Vernon Hills,” my husband soothed.
We should’ve checked out their Walmart.
Leslie