Action meanings

I’m at the Dominion again. In the car. It’s Wednesday, Jacob’s drum lesson day, so I’m here. I was going to do it a little different, walk over from parking behind the drum lesson and just get a few things but then it started to rain.

I don’t want to go in because of the fish counter guy. I have a bad feeling about him and don’t want to have to see him and what I think his brain is thinking. I’m always feeling uncomfortable around people I don’t even know, taking their actions to mean something too much to cope with.

Like today, in this particular Dominion the aisles between the vegetables are narrow, and this lady is walking right down the middle not leaving any room for me to get in, so I’m generously waiting for her to exit and she does. But couldn’t she even be polite about it, acknowledge me and what I’m doing for her? But everybody’s different. Maybe that little hum combined with the glance over my left shoulder without looking at me means “thank you” from where she comes from.

So I did make it into the Dominion. We don’t need any fish this week anyway. And if the fish guy’s there, behind the counter when I walk by I’ll just…. maybe I’ll just quietly hum and look over his left shoulder.

But first I'm still deciding in the car in the parking garage which is not a very nice one; dark, underground, very stuffy feeling. I’m listening to music. A lady, finished with her shopping, is walking towards her SUV with her maybe six year old. They look efficient, slim and properly middle class. Her vehicle shines even in the dark.

Oh, oh. If she sees me lurking in my car in the dark in the garage not going anywhere, listening to tunes, avoiding the fish guy she’s gonna think it, that I’m the one who’s the stalker. Me. She already saw the fish guy when she was shopping. The fish guy was fine. It’s not the fish guy lurking in the parking garage.

This is a case where you have to look with enormous intention away from her and her son, look in the direction of the shopping cart return area, look like you are doing some very serious and important thinking business that simply can’t be put off one second longer.

One purchase I made last week when I was shopping at the Dominion was raisins, Sun-Maid raisins. My mom used to give these to us when we were small in little cardboard boxes on the back stoop in response to our pleading to get let back into the house on sunny cold spring days. These ones are in a big plastic container you open up the top of and scrunch your fingers in to get a handful, then seal the lid back on. They’re so good Larry and I gobbled them up in a week with a little help from Jacob. Raisins are healthy too.

I wouldn’t have remembered to pick them up again. They’re in an aisle I don’t usually go to and they weren’t on my mind. But then a box of them, one box, appeared alone, towards the end of an aisle and in amongst the rice crackers. Jacob eats a lot of rice crackers. Like a peculiar case of divine intervention.