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A Hot Grocery Day
Jul. 27th, 2018 07:27 pmA queered grocery day. The glaring, angry sun must be part of the reason. A hundred-degree day in the middle of a long hundred-degree heatwave. It wears you down and can leave you a little mean. These dog days of summer can actually bark and sometimes even bite.
The first leg, the commissary run, went smooth and easy, especially for the big grocery day, a reasonably quick & easy in & out, like an old but still pleasant love affair you can watch in a movie, routine but still satisfying.
It was when we had returned home and I was finishing up putting away the food that the day started going off the rails. Jill called, stranded with car trouble. Pop said we were going to have to hold off on the rest of the grocery-shopping, as he heads out in his new car to pay back some chits.
I decided to have lunch. I have been hoping to enjoy some rotisserie chicken for a while, but I won't be having any of that on this grocery day either. I just pop a frozen pizza in the oven and watch the rest of the movie "Zoe" (a new movie starring Ewan McGregor, a human-robot love affair, with the robot-girl only lately learning that she is a robot herself and who really should have 'died' in the end to be reprocessed as a sexbot). And then I take a nap and am woken up by Pop when he returns home, and we hit the road under the blazing afternoon sun.
It was a little after one o'clock. We're not too far off our regular schedule, but things only got really queered now. As Pop gets into a parking spot at H.E.B., we hear a lot of honking. We have no idea what it's about or even where it is directed, and Pop wonders if maybe the driver knows him. Then, as I open the door, an older, lean white man comes snarling at me, yelling with a threat of violence in his voice, almost literally frothing at the mouth.
He said something like, "Don't pull that shit!" or "Stop that Shit!" I thought he was talking about the honking, and I tried to wave him off, "We weren't the ones honking," I repeated a couple of times. Then he said, "I was the one honking!" He said something about taking too long, or taking all day - to park, I guess. I have no idea what he is getting at. As I get up from the car, he starts breaking away. He is only a few inches taller than I am, and a bit older (though wonderfully lean and fit, especially for a guy in his late fifties or early sixties), and while I might be flattering myself, I suspect that he didn't want to risk things turning physical. I'm a fluidly mobile 220 pounds rising out of the car (and my back isn't bothering me today), kind of like a football player, albeit really short - like a woman without high heels, or a Latin American field-goal kicker. The fact that I am also an ugly, criminal-looking sonofabitch likely adds to the air of any menace that you might be afraid to find in me.
A little later, I realized that the old guy was probably talking about the way Pop was waiting at the front corner of the parking-row to see if that one woman was getting ready to leave. Pop was willing to wait a good while for a chance at that sweet parking space, but it turns out that she wasn't going anywhere. If that moody fellow was behind us at the time, which he probably was, it was no doubt a good long wait for him and for nothing. It cannot justify the yelling and the threat of violence, but when you throw in the raging sun, the long summer, that it is Texas, it's ... somewhat understandable. Or at least it is not unfathomable. One woman who was nearby and witnessed this nasty exchange said that I should report him. I just told her that I was glad he didn't have a gun, and I meant it. I felt like I was on my way to becoming a 'road rage' statistic, and I wasn't even the one driving.
But all is well that ends well. I even got my pink-frosted cake. No rotisserie chicken, though. Maybe next time.
The first leg, the commissary run, went smooth and easy, especially for the big grocery day, a reasonably quick & easy in & out, like an old but still pleasant love affair you can watch in a movie, routine but still satisfying.
It was when we had returned home and I was finishing up putting away the food that the day started going off the rails. Jill called, stranded with car trouble. Pop said we were going to have to hold off on the rest of the grocery-shopping, as he heads out in his new car to pay back some chits.
I decided to have lunch. I have been hoping to enjoy some rotisserie chicken for a while, but I won't be having any of that on this grocery day either. I just pop a frozen pizza in the oven and watch the rest of the movie "Zoe" (a new movie starring Ewan McGregor, a human-robot love affair, with the robot-girl only lately learning that she is a robot herself and who really should have 'died' in the end to be reprocessed as a sexbot). And then I take a nap and am woken up by Pop when he returns home, and we hit the road under the blazing afternoon sun.
It was a little after one o'clock. We're not too far off our regular schedule, but things only got really queered now. As Pop gets into a parking spot at H.E.B., we hear a lot of honking. We have no idea what it's about or even where it is directed, and Pop wonders if maybe the driver knows him. Then, as I open the door, an older, lean white man comes snarling at me, yelling with a threat of violence in his voice, almost literally frothing at the mouth.
He said something like, "Don't pull that shit!" or "Stop that Shit!" I thought he was talking about the honking, and I tried to wave him off, "We weren't the ones honking," I repeated a couple of times. Then he said, "I was the one honking!" He said something about taking too long, or taking all day - to park, I guess. I have no idea what he is getting at. As I get up from the car, he starts breaking away. He is only a few inches taller than I am, and a bit older (though wonderfully lean and fit, especially for a guy in his late fifties or early sixties), and while I might be flattering myself, I suspect that he didn't want to risk things turning physical. I'm a fluidly mobile 220 pounds rising out of the car (and my back isn't bothering me today), kind of like a football player, albeit really short - like a woman without high heels, or a Latin American field-goal kicker. The fact that I am also an ugly, criminal-looking sonofabitch likely adds to the air of any menace that you might be afraid to find in me.
A little later, I realized that the old guy was probably talking about the way Pop was waiting at the front corner of the parking-row to see if that one woman was getting ready to leave. Pop was willing to wait a good while for a chance at that sweet parking space, but it turns out that she wasn't going anywhere. If that moody fellow was behind us at the time, which he probably was, it was no doubt a good long wait for him and for nothing. It cannot justify the yelling and the threat of violence, but when you throw in the raging sun, the long summer, that it is Texas, it's ... somewhat understandable. Or at least it is not unfathomable. One woman who was nearby and witnessed this nasty exchange said that I should report him. I just told her that I was glad he didn't have a gun, and I meant it. I felt like I was on my way to becoming a 'road rage' statistic, and I wasn't even the one driving.
But all is well that ends well. I even got my pink-frosted cake. No rotisserie chicken, though. Maybe next time.
