Willing Test Subject

A few weeks ago Amy and I went grocery shopping and had a blast. We had three amazing things happen to us.

The first thing happened at the deli counter. I was taking care of that, telling the woman what I wanted and how much, and Amy was waiting at the shopping cart, about two feet behind me. While the woman was slicing our final selection, I got a phone call. I step back and tell Amy to take care of the rest, and answer the phone. While I'm talking on the phone, Amy told me later, a woman and her child also at the deli counter were waiting on their food. The woman looks at me, and then looks at the sign posted near the deli counter and read it aloud, saying "Please finish all cell phone calls before placing orders at the deli counter." Her child asks, "Mommy, why did you read that out loud?" The woman pointed to me and says, "because of him." She said that as if Amy is a complete imbecile and could not talk to a human being and say "No, thanks, that's all we need. Thanks a lot!" I wanted to find the woman again somewhere in the store, approach her and offer her my open cell phone and say, "Hey, I got this phone call, and they asked for a rude, dumb bitch. I think they may want to talk to you."

The second thing that happened was at the checkout line. The clerk was a middle-aged woman, probably mid-to-late 50s. When it got to be our turn, a younger manager-type came up and said something whimsical and left, prompting the woman to say something like, "He could suck the wind out of a tornado..." After that, Amy and I had a brief discussion on who would be paying this time, because the way we do it is, one of us pays, and then the other writes a check for half later. I said that I had paid last time, and she agreed that she would swipe her card this time around. The woman asked, "Are you married?"
Amy replied, "No, we're not - we're actually just engaged."
The woman turned to me and said, "Well, close enough. She's pretty much paid up half through the rest of her life."
I let that linger for a moment, and instead of saying, "What the fuck is wrong with your brain," I just smiled and nodded. The woman, noticing this, said, "Yeah, the smile and nod - better get used to it!"
I smiled and nodded more, which I deemed more appropriate than saying, "Don't fucking say that to me."
The wedding is more than a year away yet, and I'm already tired of the, "better get used to it" sentiment. But, as my brother quipped, "better get used to that."

Finally, after we loaded the groceries into my car, I took the cart back to the parking lot corral. When I was putting the cart in, I noticed another cart there that still had two bags in it: one with two loaves of bread, and another with a box of donuts. I thought for a second, and returned to the car to ask Amy if I should grab the bags. I believe, "Uh, yeah..." was her response. So I went back to the cart and grabbed the bags, returned to the car and chucked them in my backseat. Upon driving home, Amy and I had a discussion about the origins of the bags. Our favorite, however minimally probable, was that the bags were left there on purpose and there was a group of teenagers huddled in a car possibly with a camera trained on the cart or with notebooks in their hands, taking notes furiously as each person inspected the cart and left the bags there, until I happened upon them. Maybe they took notes as they watched me check out the bags, return to the car, go back to the cart to grab the bags return to my car again with the bags and drive off. And you know what? Fine. If they want to take notes about me doing all of that, that's fine. I can live with that, being an anonymous participant in a social experiment. It's good for their education. And furthermore, we got some free bread and donuts.