MANNERS AT WALMART

I have never thought of Walmart as a center of socially acceptable mannerisms.

But I realized this morning that there are certain 'acceptable' ways of acting, even in a perhaps lower-level of civilization such as Walmart.

My husband and I went before our weekly breakfast-out for a few necessary items, and hit Walmart in its first-of-the-month-payday splendor - crowded, noisy, busy and unsupervised.

And my dear husband kept DOING things, things which are AGAINST the natural order of shopping.

He kept leaving his cart in the middle of the aisle, without enough room for people to move around, and would walk over to a completely different aisle.

Abandoning it, and effectively blocking the aisle.

He would walk across open spaces without looking around for other customers - much like merging without yielding to traffic already there,

He would stop to look at something, and not even register the line of people behind waiting not-so-patiently for him to move.

I was getting more and more irritated at him before it really registered what I was miffed about.

And it made me stop and think - are these 'traditions' anything worthy of blindly conforming to?

I know that because he abandoned his cart in an inappropriate stop, I found out that WalMart does carry body-pillows (on a low shelf not anywhere near the regular pillows).

I got to exchange a lot of "well isn't this exasperating" looks with complete strangers.

And I suddenly recollected living in the 60's, when we were trying to be the 'new' generation, trying to shake up the status-quo, rebel against the 'old' standards.

What happened to us old hippies, who can't even approach WalMart as a new experience?

Why can't we experience WalMart as a unique and out of the ordinary occurrence? What is wrong with breaking up the nor mal (stale) order of things to look for things (body pillows) in a new and different way (and actually discover something in the process)? 

Next time I go to WalMart, I'm going to wear psychedelic colors and flowers in my hair - I'm going to go UP and the DOWN aisles and DOWN all the UP aisles - I am going to walk through in the opposite direction that I normally do - I'm going to sing old Joni Mitchell and Bob Dylan songs outloud.

It may be the only way to experience WalMart, anyway,