This weekend my wife and I spent nearly an hour searching for each other among the frozen peas and car batteries. It was like a scene from "Waiting for Godot" except that everyone kept exiting stage left down the baking aisle, mumbling soliloquies and forgetting to wait. Grocery shopping: paper or plastic ... comedy or tragedy?
Our Sunday afternoon shopping excursion for a "few quick things" was a farce from the beginning. After all, everyone knows that the words "few" and "quick" do not exist in the mega mart world of bulk price Ramen Noodles and Homer Simpson Pez dispensers. You go into one of these places for bread and milk and you leave with a cart full of Tang and a "Hang in There" inspirational kitten poster. Welcome to the nefarious world of subliminal Muzak.
To be perfectly frank, I hate grocery shopping. My job is to begrudgingly push the wobbly wheel cart with our daughter and her stuffed animal friend in tow up and down the aisles. However, this time we cut through the garden center and skipped the cart corral — decisions like this substantiate the chaos butterfly theory.
To expedite matters, I volunteered to watch Ella while my wife shopped. This is one of those ideas that sounds good in principle but rarely works in the impractical world of a four year old.
I figured the pet department could entertain us for 20 minutes so we started small with guppies and worked our way up to guinea pigs. After naming all the fish and watching hamsters sleep, a good eight minutes had passed — or so I thought since I didn't have a watch. Although it was a bit unsettling to witness an exercise in futility like a gerbil trying to dig out of a terrarium. Ella thought Mr. Whiskers was silly. I became painfully aware of my own mortal frailty — and the need for an early mid life crisis chop top Rat rod.
Having our fill of rodents, we ambled over to the penny-powered pony rides. Unfortunately, two of the equines were out of order and the third looked a few trots from the glue factory. Three cents and too few minutes later, I had to give the "no free rides in life" speech to someone wearing Disney Princess tennis shoes.
Often in the name of science, experiments have been conducted on people in which they are left alone in a room with no means of telling how much time has passed. During this test, seconds inevitably turn into minutes and minutes become eternal damnation. Strangely enough, the same holds true if you sit on a bench near crowded supermarket checkout lanes with a tightly wound offspring.
When I did finally find a clock, I wanted to strangle myself with the second hand. An estimated 40 minutes had elapsed in Dante's newly expanded Tenth Circle where the express lane is infinity items only — no less.
For the next ten minutes my wife and I did the Hokey Pokey as we put our whole self in and out of aisles searching for each other. Finally she did what no self-respecting man would do — ask for help. On my way back through the garden center, I heard my name and something along the lines of "please meet your wife by the north entrance where she wants to strangulate you with half-off paper towel rolls" over the store loudspeaker.
With no other choice, I sheepishly stepped back inside, praying no one would put a one column wide newspaper mug shot to a name just announced to 1,200 people. Within seconds I spied my wife standing next to — of all things — the shopping carts. As family reunions go, I wouldn't say it was overly joyous but at least no one cried in front of the four year old.
Unfortunately, we'll end up grocery shopping again but at least we vowed never to chase after each other or chaos butterflies in the pet aisle.
Grand Traverse Herald editor Garret Leiva can be reached at 933-1416 or email gleiva@gtherald.com