Appointed Rounds

Saturday night, it was 35 degrees and lightly sleeting when Robert and I were walking back to the car across the grocery store parking lot, and since I was not wearing a coat (because I had thought it would be too hot inside the store, not thinking about this nifty feature of coats: that they can be taken off indoors), I was feeling kind of sorry for myself. But then Robert pointed out the young guy wearing a lightweight rain jacket with a hood and a pair of knee-length shorts (?!) hunched stiffly over the long line of grocery carts he was pushing toward the building. Suddenly my situation seemed a lot better because (1) I only had to walk that distance in the cold and wet once rather than many dozen times, and (2) though I was wearing a light leather jacket instead of the wonderful water-resistant coat I had purchased last December, I at least had my freaking legs covered.

The store was pretty much a madhouse on Saturday night anyway and the lines were long in a way I’m not used to seeing outside my old (and now closed) Albertson’s. The family two carts ahead of us were obviously making use of additional dimensions of space-time to hold items they were purchasing because it was inconceivable that so many things could fit in the cart they had. (Forget clowns in a Volkswagen as the standard of the tight squeeze. I cannot fathom where the huge bag of potatoes came from.) In retrospect, it is obvious that the night before a holiday that features both big feasts and toys and candy for children will be a busy time at the grocery store, but I managed to be surprised by it.

I was also rather taken aback by the number of parents buying Easter basket items (or entire pre-packaged Easter baskets, which always seem lame to me) with their children present. These kids were young enough to still believe in the Easter Bunny, but old enough that they will easily recognize the 2 foot chocolate rabbit purchased Saturday night in Sunday morning’s basket. Has there been some mass movement toward telling children that the Easter Bunny has taken to outsourcing or are parents just so overwhelmed that they can’t manage the fairly simple-seeming task of buying this stuff on the sly? Of course, I am looking at the sample of people who are purchasing on the night before Easter, who may be a more desperate or less with-it group than parents as a whole. So perhaps I should not fear that America’s children overall are being robbed of an Easter experience in which a lagomorph plays the role of non-judgmental hero bringing chocolate-y goodness to all and sundry.

My own Easter morning conformed to a cargo cult model in which I put out my purple bunny-head basket and several minutes later, it contained a DVD of the Disney Alice in Wonderland movie (released with an extra disk of bonus materials), two Reese’s peanut butter cups, and the ugliest rabbit figurine made out of rocks ever known to man. Its big gold tooth is particularly pimpin’ and repellant. It would give a child nightmares. In the horror movie version of my life, it contains an evil spirit that will take over Leo’s body to plot the destruction of the world before realizing that Leo can’t even get over the baby gate blocking him from the rest of the apartment, thus severely limiting the scope of said destruction in a serious way. After finding that little totem, I was too afraid to test the magic basket thing again.