The Manda Gets Lost in the Supermarket

My grocery list is such a cliche. I have a cart full of Lean Cuisines, yogurt, cat food, and bananas for cereal. The checkout line is long. Too long, in my opinion, for a Sunday evening at 6:00, but I guess a lot of people had the same idea I had.

So they open another line. The cashier doing the opening looks right at me and says, "Ma'am, I can take you down here."

So I start to move, but the woman at the end of the line next to me moves faster. In my head I'm thinking a word that I won't say out loud, because my mother raised me better than that. So away she goes to the newly opened line, except she miscalculates. She hurries down one line too many, leaving me in just the right spot at the right time. I swerve my little cart of cliches right into the lane ahead of her.

"Bitch," she says out loud, because clearly her mother didn't raise her as well as mine raised me.

"Yeah. Like you didn't do the same thing," I reply. She has no response to this, which is a good thing. Sometimes these moments where Human A bumps up against Human B have a way of ending up on the news.

Any day you can leave the supermarket and not end up in police custody or on Channel 5 is a good day.