Ramming Shopping Carts Makes Shopping Fun
Having recently expanded my family to 150% of its original size, I have upgraded to the shopping cart. No longer can I do a week’s worth of shopping with a basket. I need the full-on cart. So far one absent minded person took my shopping cart by accident, which eventually they figured out. I stayed by the cart that was left behind, hoping that the accidental thief would show up to claim it. She did show up, but without my cart. Was she really going to just leave my cart somewhere else? Yes, she was. I had to ask her to go get my cart.
The best part of shopping with a cart is returning the cart. You get to slam it into a long row of other carts. It takes a fair amount of force to get a shopping cart to pop into a line of shopping carts, and it’s one of those things that you can never do too hard (except when you’re ramming your cart into a short line of carts and there’s something in front of the line, like someone’s car, or a small child). The place where I shop always has a nice long line of carts, so I always relish the slam! of the cart. Up yours, grocery store, for yet another $127 grocery bill. It’s very therapeutic.
Ramming shopping carts reminds me of a character in my neighborhood growing up. In my town there were a few, um, character houses, where such characters live. One such character used a shopping cart as his walker. He could walk just fine, mind you, but he preferred to walk with a shopping cart. Snow, ice, dirt, it didn’t matter to him. He could walk on anything with the shopping cart. Just an old shopping cart, mind you, not one of those obnoxious ATV shopping carts with giant plastic racing stripes and a cockpit with a fake wheel.
His shopping cart was pretty beat up. He loved ramming his shopping cart even more than I do, and he would swerve out of his way to ram into inanimate objects. He walked at a pretty good clip, so when he hit something–a telephone pole, a bus stop sign, a trash can–he could get a really good crash! out of it, followed by his trademark howling laugh. He was onto something, which I didn’t realize until 15 years later. The best part about his technique was the sneak attack. He’d be walking along, whistling maybe, gazing at the lillies maybe, or up at a bird. Just as he was about to pass a large, fixed object, he would make a cut worthy of Deon Sanders and plow into it. If you hadn’t seen him do this day in and day out for years, you could be forgiven for thinking that his shopping cart was enchanted by pixies.
I wonder how many other things I once considered crazy I will some day grow an appreciation for.
When I was a kid we’d play fighter pilot with the carts. The driver steered toward a lamp post while a passenger pulled the cart. At the last second, the passenger let go and the driver steered out of the way.
Great fun!