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,

ROCKY XIV

I don't like shopping at WalMart, but it's the cheapest place in town for groceries, so I go.

Our WalMart is fairly new and large, so the feeling of grayness must come from some atmospheric condition or the lighting - it just doesn't look clean or fresh or sharp, like Target does.

There always seems to be about six screaming toddlers in carts - two of them with the parents' yelling being louder than the kids.

There are way too many young grandmothers pushing around the babies while the teenage moms pick out food items.

There are adorable senior citizens walking along hand-in-hand, comparing prices to fit in with their Social Security income.

And a whole bunch of them are middle-aged shoppers racing in to get the items necessary to get dinner made in twenty minutes.

So where did I fit in with this crowd, at least today?

Today, I was the older woman with tissues stuffed up her nose, with enough blood stains to rival the Rocky movies.

I got a bloody nose on the drive into town, and simply could not shake it - not with tissues, not with pinching the bridge of my nose.... it would stop for a few minutes, then begin right up again.

From the original Rocky movie:

Mickey: Your nose is broken.

Rocky: How does it look?

Mickey: Ah, it's an improvement 

DESREVER DNEGEL

In the Greek version, Pandora opens a box that releases all the evil in the world, leaving only Hope behind.

My cat, Pandora, is hell-bent on reversing this myth.

Pandora was in a box of tiny kittens outside WalMart that a family were trying to find homes for. And they were all so precious and beautiful, it was impossible to resist.

However, I forgot one extremely important fact - anything you buy at WalMart is impossible to return.

Their 'customer service', if you apply the term loosely, seems to always have a drawn out line of people waiting in despair for the one clerk to refuse their return for an extended list of reasons:

- "It was purchased on a Tuesday; we can't take it"

- "You have to return this directly to the manufacturer in Egypt via registered certified mail that costs $12 per oz."

- "Your last name begins with a 'D', and today we can't accept returns from people whose last name begins with a 'D' "

(Sorry, got a little bit off track there - I've work at customer service at Target, and Target will take back ANYthing if you can show that you paid for it - you don't even have to have a receipt if you put it on a card of any sort - and I just don't like WalMart)

But I allowed my husband to talk me into taking one of kittens home. As we drove, he held this tiny black and white fur-ball literally in the palm of his hand.

My son came up with the name of Pandora, which sounded cute and appropriate at the time for this tiny girl.

Unfortunately, Pandora turned out to be a huge, dangerous BOY cat, the fact which we were blissfully ignorant of until I took her/him to the vet's to be neutered/fixed /spayed/whatever-the -politically-correct-name-is- today.

So I took in a girl kitty, and brought back a 'stale male' - didn't know they could do sex-change operations on cats, did you?

And I didn't realize how large he was until I took him into the vet's last year for something trivial and saw him next to other 'normal' sized cats - Pandora looks liked a medium sized cougar or a very small lion compared to them.

But Pandora has suddenly come up against resistance for the first time in his nine-plus years.

I am not letting him into my bedroom.

Since spending almost a year in San Diego sans cat, I finally realized that I am allergic to cats. So after washing all of my bedding, and keeping the bedroom day firmly shut, I breath much better at night now.

But it also means Pandora is unable to come into my room.

Battle-lines are being drawn.

He has taken to wandering around the area by my bedroom door, casually washing himself or streching out for a nap, looking for a moment when he can slip in unnoticed.

As I mentioned, he is a big cat, so he also tries laying against the door, batting at the doorknob, and when truly desperate, throws himself against it.

And when he does get in, does he go and hide under the bed? Steal into a corner so he won't be noticed?

No. This is Pandora we are taking about.

He curls up in royal splendor right in the middle of my bed so that when I finally find him, I will be able to bow down and worship him appropriately.

So the myth will be told differently from now on - all the evil will be back in the box/room with him, and Hope will be the one on the outside.

P.S. Read that title for this again - that's 'legend reversed'... reversed.