Darkness After the Grocery Store

Friday night is usually grocery night. That means I leave work promptly at pick-up time and we swing by the bank or the post office on our way to the megabox black hole shopping complex in our part of town. Target, Roundy's, Home Depot, Old Navy, Office Depot (or is it Office Max?) etc. PetSmart. A Payless Shoes. Caribou Coffee. LeeAnn Chin. AAAHHH! Places that look and smell exactly the same, everywhere you go, no matter how far you travel. Let me say that again -- these places all SMELL the same. That's just wrong.

I hate the grocery store. Not to be relentlessly negative this week, but here's the thing: It's full to the brim with single-minded, tired, irritated, oblivious shoppers. And their tired, overstimulated, hungry, crying children. Unless you shop at about 9am on a Sunday morning (because then it's mainly seniors.) But all that neural noise and ambient tension puts me right over the edge in about half an hour. My husband is somewhat less bothered by it (probably because he pushes the cart and makes most of the decisions, which means he's single-minded and slightly oblivious.) My son becomes desperate after about 45 minutes, so we usually go sit out on the bench in the entryway while the husband pays. We got in trouble for this a while back -- the husband gets lonely in line -- but really, it's best just to bale out of there as soon as it's feasible.

Another place that makes me tense is Menards. Not because of the shoppers (who tend to be men without their kids in tow, men shopping quietly and carefully for things like sander belts and fluorescent bulbs.) No, I don't like Menards because they have a big, automatic sliding exit door that sounds exactly like a distant scream each time it slides open or closed. If I had to work at the registers right in front of that door, I'm sure I'd go mad.

It's dark by 6pm now. Soon it will be dark shortly after 4pm. My husband hates this time of year, and remarked on it as we were pushing our grocery cart and our kid in his stroller out to the car. He's much more seasonal affective than I -- the darkness doesn't make much difference to me. Overcast weather (weeks and weeks of it) is what I dread -- grey days when the angle of the sun is almost impossible to discern, and time crawls. Darkness is actually a relief, compared to overcast. So we sailed off into the parking lot, with the city glowing in the distance. A chill November breeze tousled our hair, and for once we remembered where we'd left the car.