OK, so there's this one woman who works the check-out at groovy co-op grocery who is not equipped to handle toddler patrons.
This morning was the first time I had let daughter L. drive one of the toy shopping carts around the store. Since she's a big enough kid to talk about poop and since she's a big enough kid to take off her clothes at random intervals, I figured a cart would be some incentive away from naked scat chatter as we loaded up on vegetables.
She did fairly well: She didn't hit anyone and she didn't run very often. Getting her to stop was the big trick. Getting groceries into her cart was like docking with a space station: she kept a brisk and steady pace past the freezers, back through the toiletries and veering around the cereal until she would have to break left and head around past the freezer again.
So I lurched along behind her, occasionally making discreet orbital adjustments to the cart to shift its trajectory away from Martinelli sparkling cider bottles and grabbing items almost at random off the shelves and sort of heaving the bulk split peas or the organic carrots or the breakfast cereal toward the cart while daughter L. shaved the soy milk display.
One mother with an older and more genteel daughter commented both on the recurrent orbit and our choice of cereal. It turns out our product was the cereal of choice for their daughter whenever she self-identified as a cheetah: they simply poured her a bowl of this stuff and called it "Antelope Bits."
The milk they called "gazelle blood."
Eventually daughter L. had to slow down because she wanted to customize her ride. She made all sorts of minute adjustments to produce allocation onto the bottom rack so she could take on more crackers and she flipped the seat up to, um, make room for more crackers and no doubt would have tricked it out with seated-Elmo chrome mudflaps had I not stepped in. At last I shepherded her into the checkout line and we started chucking groceries up onto the counter from where we were crouched.
The socialist utopian ideals of groovy co-op grocery demand that patrons do their own bagging. When I'm shopping solo and am feeling all patchouli and goldenseal this is not an issue. But when I'm shopping with the kid I tend to look a little more distracted and am making big stacks of TVP chicken-nugget convenience foods and most checkers kindly offer a hand in jamming stuff into our array of cloth tote bags.
(In interests of full disclosure I must note that I often attempt to nudge my Mutter Museum of Medical Anomolies tote bag over to the checker just to see if I can provoke any reaction, though silk-screened conjoined-twin autopsy tote bags are I guess so pre-Warhol--it's like getting all atwitter over whether a guy has a single earring in his left ear or in his right when in fact the cultural shift to multiple piercings has--stay with this metaphor, I've almost got it in a headlock--I mean, when multiple piercings has become the norm then who cares about single piercings and sexuality and in parallel when body modification is pretty Main Street--OK, we've got the bag in sight again--then commercial clinical depictions of a radically received other hardly merit a look--but I've gotta say that a man with a toddler who is tugging at the quilted wall-hanging over by the registers gets them aware of the radical other right quick.)
But anyway: this checker adheres to the co-op checker code and I was forced to frantically stuff whole grains into the gaping maw of Chang & Eng as daughter L. with systematic application emptied the rack of shopping baskets and arrayed them on the floor around her and she had just stepped into one and was about to put another over her head when I lunged for her and by this time another patron's tofu was mingling with our own and there I was, crouching among our city's grooviest folk and I'm singing The Barney Clean-up Song, a song which daughter L. has picked up from some no-good peer somewhere and which we use to great effect on the domestic scene but which she now pretends not to know, as though I sit around watching Baby Bop while she works on her Peruvian textile projects.
"No," she began to protest. "No! No! No!"
All the while I'm scrabbling around on the floor after baskets and plaintively asking that everybody, everywhere do their share.
Happily, once we were out the door she turned on the cute and she made a box of her crackers walk down the sidewalk with us (sort of a hup-hup-hup, first one lower edge-then the next march-step) and it was 50 degrees and it smelled like Spring, the March breezes blew her hair and soon we were waving at garbage trucks.
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