Page and counter added 8/12/2001
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Shopping
for school is fun. Fun, fun, fun. It's
August first, our family's traditional Back-To-School Shopping Day. This
is a ritual that my kids anticipate with much delight, and I with
complete dread. I know I need an attitude adjustment so I vow that this
year, we are going to have fun, gosh darn it! Just in case, I pack my
purse with all the essentials for a day at the mall: a handful of
Prozac, a holy card with a prayer to St. Jude on it, and my cell phone,
which conveniently has Dr. Kevorkian's personal phone number on speed
dial.
We
plan to hit Target as soon as the doors are unlocked at 8 AM. My steel trap mind deduces that there are already six
thousand other shoppers waiting to enter the store since we have to park
about ten blocks away in a field with grazing sheep and a very confused
looking bull. Luckily an old man on a burro is willing to give us a ride
to the store for only $15.00 a piece. I dicker him down to $15.00 for
all three of us and we are on our way. We arrive an hour and forty
minutes later smelling like we slept in a barn all night but as luck
would have it, we score the
last cart in the store. Fortunately, Amy works out at World Gym and
Corey is short but muscle bound, because we end up having to take turns
literally carrying the cart since none of the four wheels moves in a
forward position. But hey, it’s little things like this that make
school shopping fun. Sure is. I
leave Amy in the junior department while Corey and I head over to the
boys department. He has his eye on an orange fleece vest and green cargo
pants. We live in south FL where the average temperature is 97 degrees
eleven months of the year, but practicality isn’t his strong suit and
we throw the ensemble into our sadly dilapidated cart. Since Corey
operates on the theory that his clothes must all be a minimum of two
sizes too big for him, I prepare myself for the note that his teacher
will invariably send home on the day that he wears this outfit saying,
Corey
picks out several oversized tee shirts with fire breathing dragons and
/or skulls on them (don’t ask) and 3 pairs of jean shorts that would
fit a sumo wrestler. Through some sort of mental lapse, I have
accidentally switched carts with someone whose cart has four perfectly
good wheels. Luckily she has an eagle eye and thoughtfully points it out
to us before we get too far. One of the fun things about shopping is
meeting new people. Yep, it’s sure fun to meet new people. New people
with better shopping carts. That is what I call fun. After
loading our booty into our motion-challenged cart, we head over to
juniors to find Amy. In the hour that it has taken me to outfit Corey,
she has found one shirt. One. Uno. Une. But she is not slow; she is selective. Selective Amy, I call her. Sure do. Selectively slow Amy.
Picky, indecisive, selectively slow Amy. But shopping with her is fun,
you can be sure. Oh so darn fun. To
really make our shopping trip
special, we go to the snack bar to treat ourselves. It doesn’t take
long to decide that we’ll just get a drink when one of the customers
loses a tooth when he bites into a grilled cheese sandwich. We wait 25
minutes while the lady in front of us in line ponders her order. What is
tripping her up is that she’s “just not sure that the filet of fish
is actually fresh.” I have
seen this fish sandwich. It is a square piece of orangish something that
may or may not be fish, but I am pretty darn sure that whatever it is,
it is not fresh. The girl behind the counter assures her that it must be, after all we aren’t even 20 miles from the Atlantic
Ocean. While they continue to debate the issue, I search frantically for
a plastic knife to impale myself on. The kids and I split a large cherry
Icee, which Corey downs too fast and ends up belching, “Thanks, Mom”
in front of the whole snack bar. He is ever so fun to take out in
public. Just a great big bundle of fun, I always say. Yep, that is sure
what I always say. It
should be noted that my children will only buy a pair of school shoes
after perusing all 367 shoe stores at the local mall. To this end, we
pay for our items at Target and make the long trek out to the car. I
tell the kids it’s not that far and then completely lose all
credibility when we pass a sign that says, “You are entering a totally
different county, which is way far away from all civilization,
especially Target.” We
trudge through sheep pies to our car, which is a crisp ten thousand
degrees inside after sitting in the sun all morning. But at least we are
having fun. We sure are! We
arrive at the mall and after circling the parking lot for only 44 Our
mall easily has over four hundred shoe stores, each of which carry the
same identical stock, all priced within $1.00 of each other. My
children, who are nothing if not thorough, are quite sure that they
cannot make a decision about which shoe to buy until they have seen
every shoe in the mall. To make matters more complex, Corey’s
particular taste runs to a brand of shoe that is not even sold in this
country. After every single shoe salesperson, in every single shoe
store, tells him they have never heard of the shoes he’s looking for,
he tells me he’ll think
about maybe picking out a
different pair. Maybe. I shoot
him a look that only a mother who has been shopping for an elusive pair
of shoes for over 7 hours could get away with. I don’t tell him that
was the first fun thing I’ve done all day. Four
hours, three ice cream cones, six Mrs. Field’s Cookies, and multiple
Pepsi’s later, Amy finds the perfect Nikes, which, I might add, are
remarkably similar to the very first pair she tried on when we first
entered the mall, oh so long ago. Corey, on the other hand, needs some
incentive so we strike a deal, which I am barred from revealing since I
agreed to a gag order (we would go to the only mall that would have a
storefront “Litigators R Us”). At last both kids are outfitted from
head to toe for school. Rats! No more school shopping fun for a whole
year. There are no words to describe my disappointment. None, nada,
zilch, zip, zero.
Copyright August 2000
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