The Unreported Dangers of Grocery Shopping

While at my local Safeway a few days ago, I narrowly escaped my demise on three separate occasions.

Setting aside the irony of multiple near-death experiences at a store with “Safe” in its name, I feel it’s my moral obligation to warn the general public about the dangers I recently faced. Shopper, beware!

It began in the produce section, and as is the case with many a produce section, the aisles are wider than those in the rest of the store: I believe it was the ample space in the area that saved me. As I reached out for a mid-sized russet, I narrowly missed being sideswiped by a boy DARTING AROUND SHOPPERS AND CARTS ON HIS ROLLER SKATE SHOES.

Let me be clear: this was not an open-air, farmer’s market setting—it was a fully enclosed grocery store. And the little runt was recreating (the original) Rollerball in the aisles.

I looked around for the parent/guardian, but saw no one with the proper degree of humiliation and/or anger sweeping his/her face.

Nice.

The kid was long gone by the time I was able to shake off the startle and return to my potatoes, and that was fine by me: I might have stuck a russet in his path had he continued.

I’d forgotten the affair by the time I headed down the bread aisle, but roller-kid struck again: this time, I was turning back towards my cart to deposit my loaf when he skirted between it and me.

There was no one else in the aisle, and I realized the skater was speeding through the store unsupervised.

Nice.

(Where is a decent serial killer of children when you need one?)

Normally, there is an employee around every corner, and my first hope was one would be plowed down by the kid before too much more time passed. If that didn’t work out, I was determined to report the activity to the next smock-wearing individual I could find. (Unless I found the child’s parent/guardian first—in which case I anticipated losing momentary control of my cart: whether I hit the kid or his supervisor being irrelevant.)

Several aisles later, having neither seen nor been brushed back by the mad-skater, I felt certain he’d been stopped, injured, or banished. Oh, sweet safety.

The coup de grace occurred while I maneuvered my cart from a particularly busy aisle into the main thoroughfare that leads to the checkout aisles. As I pulled forward, there he was for a third time speeding his way in my direction; however, this time, the path behind me was full, so I couldn’t put my cart into reverse. His eyes got wide, and he tried to apply his non-existent brakes.

[The remaining portion of this entry has been written in slow-motion to allow you the best view of the action.]

As the raucous little boy edged closer and closer to the metal barrier that was my cart, I spied his guardian and noted she was engrossed in a cell-phone conversation: she too was headed straight for me. [Cue evil laugh track.]

The smile on my face spread in blissful unison with the look of terror spreading across the boy’s mug, and I breathed deeply of the aromatic smell of victory as the skating menace hit my cart mid-speed. Almost immediately, the little monster was pinned by his inattentive mother who sandwiched her angel between my cart and hers.

Very nice.

Work in Progress: The Well

I was seventeen years old when my father murdered Rose Acres, and while I haven't yet decided if the term murder fits, that's the word my father used. A week after he'd done it, he'd driven his car off a cliff and was dead also. I was left alone to face a town that was still reeling from the events and divided over what was truth and what was fiction.

Since the fire destroyed almost everything I own, I can’t help but feel as if some of what my father said over the years is true. Perhaps he was as sane as anyone after all. But that's something I can’t decide for myself because it's no longer my father's sanity that's in question: it's mine, and a person shouldn’t try to decide on his own whether or not he’s crazy.

In the hours before he committed the murder, my father filled the pages—front and back—of three spiral notebooks. The words in those books, written in my father's clumsy hand, served as the explanation behind what led my father to his sealing Rose Acres' fate.

***
The consensus was mixed: about half the population wanted Rose Acres eliminated as quickly and mercilessly as possible, while the other half was in favor of a stay of execution—provided it was followed by a carefully planned rehabilitation period. And this was not the first time Rose Acres had been on the verge of death. The last time, about forty years earlier, Rose Acres' identity hadn't been clearly established; in fact, most of her best-known features hadn't yet taken shape. But even then, she had straddled the precarious balance between life and death without seeming to care which direction fate swung.

The earlier decision to exonerate Rose Acres had hinged almost solely on her historical significance. The bronze dedication plaque, a wrought iron bench, and a small patch of more-yellow-than-green grass were all that separated her from any other undeveloped bit of land, but the plaque and bench had been installed to mark the town's establishment, and although the center of town had shifted away from the bench and plaque, the town council simply could not bring themselves to remove either of those land marks.

Since her first brush with death, Rose Acres had grown into a respectable, if small, park—due primarily to the addition of a wishing well, a swing set, another fifty square feet of grass, several strategically placed trees, and an automatic sprinkler system. The uneducated often wondered where the roses were and why the park wasn't several acres in size, but those who were observant would have caught that Rose Acres was the name of the first Mayor's mother—it said so on the bronze marker.

The issue that had the town in fits when my father intervened and sealed Rose Acres' fate had to do with money—at least on its surface. Rose Acres had grown out-of-place in a town that had become more city and less country. She remained the only real bit of nature among brick buildings, parking garages, and moderately-busy streets and stood as an oasis of sorts—a sad reminder to the older residents of the town of what they had lost in the name of modernization.

Attention: You Are Not Alone in the Universe

Several days ago, a new phenomenon began to occur in my neighborhood. Normally, the early morning hours are filled with a variety of nature’s sounds including wild birds singing, deer walking their well-worn paths while crunching the occasional leaf, and dogs barking here and there. Aside from the dogs, it’s a great way to begin a day.

Last week, while the various forest creatures were beginning their early-morning routines, and I was pouring my second cup of coffee, a car horn sounded several long, obnoxious, un-forest-like hoots.

The noise silenced everything else but reverberated through the area like the screeching echo of a beast. Talk about a mood spoiler.

The next day, it happened again.

And so it appears it will be on weekday mornings.

The driver is obviously picking up another passenger, and the idiot behind the wheel is so pathetically lazy and rude he/she thinks laying on the horn is appropriate.

I hated the horn-honk when I lived in the city, and in the mountains, it is just this side of criminal.

But it goes far beyond the noise: in the car, I imagine (based on the time) there is at least one school-aged child being taught by his or her parent/guardian that it's perfectly fine to be lazy and rude and honk one’s vehicle horn in the peaceful hours of the early morning.

Neighbors be damned.

That same passenger is also being taught that getting out of one’s car, walking up to the door of a person with whom you are about to share a ride is a complete waste of time and energy.

At the very least, the asinine honker might send the kid from the car up to the door, but that might mean the child actually burns up a few stored calories, so forget it.

And before anyone points out the driver might have only an infant who can’t be left in an automobile, I ask you: do you think the dingbat driver is without a cell phone? What—he/she can’t pull to the curb, park the car, and call the person in the house to announce the grand arrival? (Heaven forbid the rider wait outside in the beautiful, late-summer air.)

I can promise you this: if the honking keeps up, I’ll be getting into my own car and driving the vicinity to find the mad honker so that I might honk at him or her myself.

What is wrong with people?

The Day the Rains Came

Small towns have a certain allure. It might be the landscape or the architecture. It might be the people. It might even be a combination of things, and Fallover was no different. It was just another small town with its share of lore and mystique—two qualities which seemed to rise and fall in proportion to the number of tourists who were in town—but all-in-all, Fallover could have been Anywhere, USA.

Until the rains came.

Until the bad things started.

That’s what Roger Crocket eventually called them: the bad things.

Roger’s goldfish had turned belly up the day the rains came, and even though no one (including Roger) understood on that day that it would be remembered as the day the rains came for as long as Fallover existed, Roger did understand a fish who was belly up was a goner. He also understood that his fish had been fine earlier that morning. (Of course, that idea remained in the boy’s subconscious until he began to connect the rains to the beginning of the bad things.)

The passing of a goldfish isn’t cause for alarm, and neither is rain—even the odd spurts Fallover was experiencing at a time of the year during which precipitation was basically unheard of—but after nearly two weeks of the rains, it wasn’t just a small boy grieving for his goldfish who began to notice something was very wrong—that bad things were happening.

The rains that came to Fallover were not unrelenting showers spread out over days-on-end. They began as one or two daily instances of sudden, torrential downpours that lasted no longer than one minute a piece. There was never a cloud in the sky, nor was there a change in the temperature, and the smell that should have been in the air was absent: in other words, the rains came out of nowhere.

It became apparent that the passing of each little storm left a tragedy in its wake: Roger’s goldfish had been the first, but to the list had been added a variety of in-home mishaps, several traffic collisions, and the fire that had broken out so suddenly at the town’s only grocery.

If you were to chart these events—as many in Fallover began to do—you’d have noticed that each new rain brought with it a tragedy of increasing seriousness. The first few in-home mishaps were things like small appliances malfunctioning, but these events quickly escalated to include larger appliances.

When the ice-maker on Mrs. Tarlson’s refrigerator shot out a knife-like “cube” that embedded itself into her forearm, people began to get worried.

The traffic accidents followed a similar path: first, a car that had been parked before one of the storms ended up in motion after the rain had passed—it took out a large section of the fence surrounding the grade school. Shortly thereafter, car-chasing dogs became a thing of the past. Just before objects began igniting in Fallover, a cadet was run-over in the fire house. No one had seen what happened, but little sense could made of a man’s being found beneath the rear tires of a fire truck that was parked as usual in the station house.

The escalating tragedies were only part of the problem: with the passing of time, the frequency of the rains had increased: near the end of the fourth week, they occurred up to five times each day.

By the time the residents of Fallover realized leaving might be the only thing standing between themselves and death, the fence had been put up around the entire town. No one saw it go up, and no one had heard anything either.

One morning it was just there.

Everywhere.

Surrounding Fallover.

It had been six weeks since the day the rains came, and suddenly, the people of Fallover were trapped. The bad things continued after each of the storms, but once the fence went up, worse things began to occur.

Fallover lost all contact with the outside world. While the residents still had electricity, not a television or a radio or a telephone worked. Meanwhile, each time one of the rains ended, a fire broke out. The grocery had gone up first, and though this complicated the food situation in town, at least no one had been inside. Shortly after the store burned, the first occupied vehicle was incinerated. The next day, an entire house (and its family) was reduced to ashes.

The rains had become even more frequent, and like the clocks that chimed the hour in Fallover, the rains marked the passing of time—as did the fires.

Bit-by-bit, person-by-person, and building-by-building, Fallover was being transformed into piles of charred and soggy rubble.

Roger was trying to explain to his mother and his grandparents that all of all of the bad things had started with the death of his goldfish when another of the rains came. Roger’s mother went to the back door and yelled for her husband to come in from the garage. As she yelled, the rain stopped. The sound of the pelting drops was instantly replaced by the WHOOSH of the flames that engulfed her home, her son, and her parents.

Roger’s father didn’t bother to watch his home and family burn to the ground. He knew, as did everyone who was left in Fallover, that the fires burned so fast and hot that nothing would be left of everything he had loved in his life.

Turning back to the garage, Roger’s father got into his car and drove to the section of the fence closest to what had only moments before been his home. He got out of the car and looked the fence up and down. After several minutes, he ran straight at it, determined to climb his way out of Fallover.

As Roger’s father ran toward the black monster that kept Fallover’s residents at bay, another of the rains fell, and at the instant he hit the fence, the rain stopped.

His body exploded into fleshy particles as water droplets mixed with the high voltage of the fence.

A lone, dry spot remained to mark the last efforts of a man—until the next of the Fallover rains fell.

You Know You're Old When. . .

. . .you remember typing papers on a typewriter, and you went to the doctor if you had a virus.

Those were the good old days, you know, before the words personal and computer became associated with one another.

According to several articles, this marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the very first personal computer virus.

Written by then ninth-grader Rich Skrenta (now 40) who called it “some dumb little practical joke,” perhaps the funniest part of the gaff is where the virus was grown: on the hard drive of an Apple II computer. (Talk about not PC!)

I think I finally understand the missing bite in Apple’s logo: it represents the origin of the term chip off the block—knew you could do it.

For those of you who want that piece back, dig around in your non-Apple hard drives!

Work in Progress: Test Case

My name is Karen Deerborne. I am a prosecuting attorney, and as such, I am used to establishing things. I tell you this because I want to be clear: I am not a promiscuous woman. I am not a risk-taker. I have never been picked up by a stranger in a bar, and until last night, I had never had anonymous sex.

* * *

The digital clock on my desk flashed as 11:59 pm turned into 12:00 am. Exhausted and feeling the weight of the previous day settling on my shoulders, I closed the file I’d been reviewing, turned off my desk lamp, and left my office carrying nothing but my purse. Walking down the hallway, I mentally planned the next few hours of my life: home, quick shower, sleep until 4:00 am, shower again, dress, eat, be back in the office by 5:30. It was going to be another in a string of very long days that had turned into several very long weeks.

My mind raced around the events of the last few days: a mysterious man had been entering the homes of single women, catching them unaware, blindfolding them, and forcing them to undress and masturbate for him. He had done the victim’s no additional harm, and while each of the women expressed shame at the idea of being forced into such an intimate act while being observed by a stranger, they all noted their “attacker” had been polite and kind. The newspapers had dubbed the man Mr. Perfect after one female journalist commented about it being the perfect crime: the victim and the suspect each getting what they wanted, and proclaiming that if Mr. Perfect kept it up, Arlingtown would be filled with the happiest, most satisfied women on the planet.

Reaching the end of the hallway, I made a left turn, punched the elevator’s down button, and waited for the car to arrive on my floor. Moments later, the doors slide open, and I entered the ornate box while willing myself to let go of everything work-related as one-by-one the floors to the ground ticked by. The ride down thirty-six floors doesn’t take very long, but as I felt the elevator slow, my internal counter alerted me to an unplanned stop. Looking up at the numbers above the door, I saw the 26 light up, felt the slowing movement turn to a dead stop, and waited for the doors to open.

Expecting Charlie, the building’s janitor, I was taken aback when a man in a suit was waiting at the other side of the doors. The man seemed as startled as I was, and I immediately read his hesitation. Moving over, I tried to make clear to him I wasn’t a woman frightened by an unknown man getting into an elevator in the middle of the night. Of course, I was, but I didn’t need the man standing in front of me to know it. Moments after the man stepped in, the car’s doors slide silently closed, and with the touch of the lobby button, we were on the move.

The odd silence of elevators descended around us, and the relaxation I had tried to find before the man’s appearance had gone into hiding.

“Late night, for both of us, I guess.”

He spoke with a deeply melodic voice, and when I met his eyes to respond, I felt a sudden tingle run through me.

“So it seems.”

I waited for his next polite statement, but instead of speaking, he simply looked at me. Ordinarily, a gaze like his would bother me, yet his eyes and his stare seemed harmless—inviting even.

Turning a Critical Eye on the Carpool Lane

I commute to work, and when I say commute, I don’t mean drive: I mean commute, as in I live over 60 miles from the campus at which I teach. In terms of driving time, it takes me nearly 90 minutes to get from my home to school, and that’s if there are no unforeseen events.

The first thirty minutes of my commute is on a winding mountain road, and any other driver who’s ahead of me has the potential to be one of those unforeseen events by merely traveling slower than I do.

Then there are the traffic accidents: the freeway is filled with unskilled multitaskers, and none of them has the common decency to have single-car collisions: they always have to involve others in their shortcomings.

Which brings me to the carpool lane.

When our schedules allow, I carpool with a coworker, but it’s not an easy thing to do. We rarely have identical schedules, so there’s an hour or two either before or after arrival during which one of us is trying to work in a shared office that’s the size of a small home’s master bathroom. (To say it isn’t an ideal working environment is an understatement.)

There are other issues as well: once committed to a carpool, errands are out of the question, and for me, this makes things very difficult. Although my coworker lives 45 miles from campus, she is 10-15 minutes from things like the grocery store, the gas station, and the typical assortment of convenience-based businesses to which most of us who live in non-yurts have become accustomed.

My shopping and gassing up and getting a hair cut are best planned around a trip into town (i.e. going to work) because I live thirty minutes from civilization. Unfortunately, once I drop off my carpool partner, I have passed everything I need, and turning back down the hill sounds like fingers—lots and lots of fingers—scraping down a chalkboard.

I also have friends and family who live near my campus, so getting to see them before or after I teach is a luxury I lose when I am sharing a ride with someone else.

But the gas savings is huge, and passing hundreds of bumper-to-bumper cars is such a time saver, I generally compromise by choosing one day per week as my non-carpooling day and plan all of my errands and visits around it.

I have mixed feelings about the carpool lane: I think it’s a great idea to encourage drivers to share rides whenever possible; however, I’m not sure the carpool lane is the best way to encourage what ought to be natural behavior.

The carpool lane functions on three basic principles:

1. Take away and entire lane of the freeway from the majority of drivers causing what is already a major traffic backup to become worse.
2. Allow an itty bitty percentage of drivers to use an almost-empty lane provided they pack their cars with the requisite number of bodies.
3. Pretend taking away a lane from the majority to encourage a minority does something to help the environment while overlooking the fact that the backed-up cars are getting nowhere fast and throwing crap into the air for greater amounts of time.

Again, the point of the carpool lane is to get people who are going to the same place to share rides, and by ridesharing, to get a car off of the roadway.

So how does a minivan with one adult and one or more kids fit? Was there ever a chance that mom or dad or insert-adult-title-here was going to go someplace while the child was going to go to another place, but they decided to take only one car to save on gas and to toss less pollution into the air?

I’m sorry, but the carpool lane should be reserved for driving-aged persons who take the time to plan, and who are willing to sacrifice a bit in the name of line-cutting and environmental responsibility.

The non-driving-age passengers should not count because no car was taken off the road by the actions of the adult and child being in a car together. Unless I get to pack up one of my dogs and use the carpool lane—that would make things fair.