Living in the Fast Lane---I Need a Rolling Eyes Icon Here!

I love going to my favorite grocery store. It’s a place that covers many acres and has everything from international foods and barbeque grills to oil for your car and underpants for your incontinent cat. If you can’t find something interesting there, you haven’t tried hard enough. It is open 24/7/365 days a year and Don and I used to spend a lot of time wandering the aisles in the wee hours after midnight. In the still of the night when I can’t sleep, sometimes I wish I could go there but I no longer feel safe out and about in the middle of the night without Don at my side, so on sleepless nights I stay in bed and find a movie to watch. I can count on my fingers the number of science fiction monster films I’ve seen in my lifetime so it surprised me when the 1998 version of Godzilla caught my attention a few nights go. I found myself laughing at the quirky dialogue until 3:30 in the morning. And I loved the French Foreign Intelligence Agent who chewed gum and talked like Elvis when he wanted to sound like an American.

Birds: Don’t all old people talk about birds? The ones who come to my feeders are greedy little buggers. I want to put up one of those dispensers like they have at the grocery store that spits out numbered tickets so people can get served at the meat counter in an orderly, first-come-first-serve manner. Number 42, you're next Mr. Cardinal! I love my red-bellied and hairy woodpeckers. I love my finches, cardinals, orioles, and nut hatches. I love my three morning doves, the juncos, grosbeaks and even those noisy jaybirds. But the cowbirds and blackbirds? If I thought I could scare them off without putting out the neighbor’s eye in the process, I’d get out my Davy Crockett sling shot and practice teaching the cowbirds and blackbirds that the welcome mat is not out there for them.

I used to smile indulgently at old people who talked about their birds. Now, I want to hop in Dr. Brown’s time-traveling DeLorean and go back a few decades and beg for forgiveness of all those bird feeding people I may have besmirched beneath my breath. The birds have needs and I have a need to be needed. Okay, I get it now, but what next? Will I find myself standing in front of a display of hemorrhoid medication at the grocery store with my crystal ball in hand wondering if I should stock up, or not? Ever see the TV commercial where they say, “Even though she doesn’t need them, Cheryl Burke is dancing in Depends Silhouette Briefs…..blah, blah, blah?” If I actually do bring some hemorrhoid cream up to the checkout stand I can visualize a voice-over coming on the loud speaker saying, “Even though she doesn’t need it, Jean is buying hemorrhoid cream to apply to the wrinkles underneath her eyes. Oh, wait! She does need it! She’s been watching bad movies until 3:30 in the morning again!” Widowhood sucks sometimes. It robs you of sleep when you least expect it.

Over the weekend I went to a different grocery store than the one I described up above. It’s close to my house and sometimes I pop in there on my way home from going somewhere else. They have a price matching policy and the woman in line in front of me had brought in a receipt and an advertisement from last week and she wanted a 72 cent refund. Oops, someone had messed up on price matching crap. It took an enormous amount of time and two people but she cheerfully got her 72 cents. At first I wanted to give her 72 cent so she could quickly be on her way  but then I remembered I was going home to an empty house so what difference did it make if she stole five minutes of my life I can’t get back. I was alive. I was well and not so broke that 72 cents mattered in the grand scheme of my life like it apparently did to the other women in line. If there had been a fancy-ass chocolate truffle display near-by I would have bought us both one to celebrate my new-found patience---another benefit of being a lonely widow---and in my favorite store I could have done just that. ©