Kindra and I were in the fruit section of the grocery store Saturday, picking out apples for lunches and snacks this week.
My hands were full of Honeycrisps and Galas, so Kindra stepped toward the baggie dispenser to get a couple.
It was then that a guy came up from the starboard, tossed a bag of carrots into our cart and wheeled it off toward the meat section.
How strange. That’s odd behavior even for where we buy groceries.
I took a couple of steps after him, then realized that all we had in the cart was a 24-pack of Mountain Dew (for Kindra - I have been on the Dew wagon for coming up on six months) and a bag of cherries.
Getting another cart and more Dew and cherries would be less effort than a pursuit with my hands full of apples and perhaps creating a scene.
Kindra often chucks her purse into the cart when we’re shopping, but she hadn’t this time, so no worries. I powered down and we re-carted and continued shopping.
The rest of our time in the store, Kindra and I speculated on what was up with the guy and why he thought that was his cart.
I guessed that he believed his wife had left the cart and headed off to pick up shredded cheese or something, but we saw him later pushing it by the bacon and he was stag. So, nix the wife’s involvement.
Later, we found a 24-pack of Dew someone had discarded on a stack of bottled water, so we figured that was the one from our/his cart.
The water was a long way from the apple bin, so, if that was the case, he was mighty slow to realize the Dews weren’t his.
We never saw the cherries, so we assumed he ended up going with them.
Kindra thought that he believed it was his cart and that someone had pranked him by putting random items in the cart. Plausible.
Or it could have been that he saw us testing carts on the way in.
I spend what some people might consider an annoying amount of time checking the wheel alignment and rollability of grocery carts before making my final selection.
Carts with out-of-round wheels or bad alignment bug me no end. Hate might be too strong of a word for my attitude toward them, but not by much.
I’ll be pushing the thing all over the store and I want one that goes smoothly and quietly.
Maybe our guy wanted a smooth-rolling cart and figured it was worth the risk to try hijacking our highly researched model.
Or it could have just been he had one of those absent-minded moments.
Kind of like I did the time I got in the wrong car and tried to start it.
Or the time I walked into the women’s bathroom by mistake at a college basketball game. They really need to make those signs bigger.
Or the time that was too embarrassing for me to mention here.
Or the time I had been cleaning jalapeno peppers and forgot and rubbed my eye.
Or the time at an airport when I causally watched a plane loading and realized after it took off that it was the one I was supposed to be on.
So, I’ll cut the guy some slack. He didn’t get Kindra’s purse, the store had more Dew and cherries and the experience gave us something to talk about it.
All in all, that’s not too bad an outcome.