Walmart

You really can buy almost anything at WalMart.

I run quickly by the food section. Love the crumbled Feta cheese. I mean, at least it’s honest.

The imported Israeli Mexican specialties are more amusing.

I bought a small container of Icelandic caviar (“black capelin roe”) for $4 on a recent outing and I am eating it slowly because it is as good as I have ever had.

I can get exercise running up and down the aisles.

I have to avoid the craft section, though. At this stage of my life it has become an eater-up of time to produce objects that occupy space. Avoid toys. Jewelry. Everything is so delightfully reasonably priced. But I have so much of trinkets and baubles I should start a trinket and bauble museum.

But in the aisles of Walmart it is, I think, more comfortable and more safe to keep moving quickly.

I nestle my cane in the part of the basket just in front of the handle. Leaning on a basket with wheels I can move lots faster than with a cane.

I also tend to discourage social interaction, which is to be preferred at WalMart.

When I must linger, in places like the pharmacy shelves when I must search for some of the world’s cheaper pharmaceutical supplements, I meet couples from other languages and cultures whose aggressive toddlers think my (neuropathy hypersensitive) legs are a suitable place to hone their punching skills.

There is usually an elderly matron who asks me if a probiotic makes a good laxative (that’s not what they’re made for) or whether folic acid or alpha-lipoic acid is the one that lowers blood sugar.

Of course, the latter info is worth money in the bank, so it is safer to answer “Sorry, I don’t understand” in English, French of Spanish.

Explaining the difference between vitamins and anti-oxidants is not for amateurs.

Women and Children abound, usually all in their pajamas and screaming at each other and of course, running into me.

The wearing of pajama pants into Walmart must be a universal truism. One of my patients wanted to try a comic monologue (I offered him the wearing of pajamas into Walmart as a starting point for his monologue). I believe he acquitted himself quite well.

The most important people to outrun are men who attempt to pick me up in the aisles. “Hey let’s talk about you! I would like to know about why a wman would wear a sequined hat to Walmart?”

I answered, “To reflect light, obviously. Sorry, but I’m in a hurry to meet my husband at the register,” (I was).

I will admit that my clothes are a bit eccentric. I did not, however, choose them to pick up men at Walmart.

The other day I was wearing my monkey sweater. It is knit in a pattern with cute little monkeys in the trees with coconuts. He was complimenting it, and reaching for me.

I just increased my speed.

I exclaimed “You can’t touch the monkeys!”

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