Picture the hypothetical man pushing a cart alone through the grocery store, list in hand. Dozens of items are on it, including body wash, lunch meat, cheese slices, and feminine-hygiene products.
Wait a minute! Feminine-hygiene products? Is he nuts?
Our hero had a moment of doubt when his wife added them to the list, but he quickly squelched it. After all, he’s a 40-year-old man, not some callow kid whose voice goes up three octaves when he asks the pharmacist for a pack of prophylactics. “Grow up,” he said to himself, “you can do it.”
But this was at home, when the prospect of wheeling the cart past the toothpaste and mouthwash and into That Aisle was a half-hour away. Anything a half-hour away is an eternity to a man, hardly worth mentioning until it is much closer.
And now it’s much closer.
Our hero wipes his sweaty palms on his shirt. He cruises past the display, casually looking in its direction, spotting the light-blue box with the yellow banner, the same style colors he has seen for years in the bottom drawer of the bathroom cupboard, the drawer that may as well be marked with a skull and crossbones and the word “poison.”
He almost makes his move, but people are all about. A mother with her children, an old man with a cane, a couple ornery kids doing God knows what with the liquid soap, all too close for him to grab the product.
“It’s a natural part of life,” he hears his wife whisper, like the phantom voice of Obi Wan Kenobi telling Luke to use the Force. “Yeah, what’s the big deal, Dad?” his daughter wants to know. Another disembodied spirit heard from.
He makes a second pass. Mom and kids are gone, the old man has tottered off, and the Lever brothers have slithered away. The coast is clear. He looks down into his empty cart – why, oh why, didn’t he pick up some other items first, so he could hide the “no big deal” products beneath!
His hand shoots out. Bam! One box goes into the cart. Bam! A second box is almost ready to join its partner – when a customer turns the corner.
Don’t ask if the customer is male or female, young or old, singular or plural. Blood rushes to his cheeks, his face goes four shades of red and he feels as if he might faint. The only thing that keeps him upright is the potential embarrassment that would accompany passing out in That Aisle.
Meanwhile, he still has a stranglehold on the second box, which hangs precipitously over the cart. One involuntary muscle spasm later, it drops – plop! – into the chasm. Picture the Coyote slinking off after a trap to catch the Road Runner has blown up in his face and you’ll know how the man exits the vicinity.
The worst is surely over, our hero believes. All he has to do is get the other items on the list, use them to cover the two “no big deals,” and get the heck out of Dodge. But then he sees a former student, one who has likely noticed that his teacher is escorting two boxes of Kotex through the store in an otherwise empty cart. Making small talk while driving a shopping buggy at 55 mph is an art, but our hero masters it.
He runs into two more students, but not before he’s boxed in his special selections with cat litter, a head of lettuce and a can of Pledge.
All that remains is the minor indignity of the conveyor belt and the checkout line. Mercifully absent is anybody he knows. In the car on the way home, he sighs in relief. This has certainly been a character-building experience, an expression people use for any job they aren’t man enough to do themselves.
Would our hero do it again? Certainly he would. Hypothetically, of course.
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