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Monday, October 1, 2007

The K-Mart Chronicles

The day my father died I wasn’t in K-Mart. I could have been. The last two years I’ve wandered the aisles buying short sleeved madras style shirts and denim jeans, and just like the madras shirts I bought in 1968, my new shirts are not wrinkle free. Though I bought so many, I don’t felt guilty or stupid because I never paid much more than four dollars.

That was then. Now, I look in my closet and I see a long rack of boring shirts that take years to iron.

This past month, and aching for a wardrobe change, I’ve been eyeing a shirt with a tropical theme. K-Mart has many varieties of these faux Hawaiian looking things, but only one I think I can live with. Not the one with the blue background and the splashy white petals, or the cow dung brown shirt with pink Nash Ramblers behind split rail fences, but the black one with smallish white orchids scattered about. This shirt would be a big change for my static-since-high-school wardrobe and it would reflect my new laid back attitude.

So, as usual, like a guy with absolutely no reason to buy yet another shirt , I stalk the rack and watch the price drop. The shirt started at a lofty fifteen dollars, but a week ago it was reduced to six and I almost pounced. I’m glad I didn’t because Friday night, there it was, scrunched up on the rack with the other summer clearance items. A buck forty-nine. Mine.

I remove it from its hanger and drape it over the side of my cart and continue my aimless stroll. I pace up and down the auto aisle, I walk back to the fizzy water section, I look for birdseed, I pass the halloween display and think what I always think – maybe I should buy a mask for this year’s camping trip – and eventually I add a couple gallons of Clorox to my cart and move to checkout. But, I’m not really ready to go home, so I leave my cart and head to headache remedies. There I pick up a travel size bottle of aspirin and return to my cart. Except, of course, like always, the goddamn thing has disappeared.

Except, of course,  I don’t really know where I left it. Rat-like, I retrace my steps through the aisles but still no cart. Then I see a guy in a red K-Mart jacket standing next to a shopping basket putting two gallons of Chlorox back on the shelf. I run up to him, ” I think you took my stuff.” He looks up, startled, as if I were going to punch him. I peer down and see all manner of assorted junk in his cart but no shirt. I reach down and flip through women’s underwear, bags of candy corn, magazines and plastic toys, but I don’t see my white orchids.

“I’m looking for my Hawaiian shirt. Have you seen it?” The burly guy with the mustache and the posture of a wind-tormented palm mumbles, “I don’t see no shirt.”

No, he don’t see no shirt and neither do I. I run back to the discount rack fearing hordes have lined up to steal my bargain, and it ain’t there. I return the next day and realize it’s gone for good, but I do spy some heavily discounted plaid shirts.

posted by michael at 4:21 pm  

12 Comments »

  1. I think they chucked it, and it skipped 51 times.

    Did anyone else think this was a very sad story?

    Comment by Jennifer — October 1, 2007 @ 7:37 pm

  2. Yes, I thought it was sad. I feel bad for the shirt actually. Who else would buy it?

    Comment by Chris — October 1, 2007 @ 8:29 pm

  3. Sad to think of Michael wandering aimlessly through K-mart, looking for his cart with the $1.49 shirt. And sadder still that he took no pictures.

    Comment by rakkity — October 1, 2007 @ 11:43 pm

  4. But what if my descriptions didn’t match my pictures? What if those weren’t Nash Ramblers? A question you might find posed by Zippy the Pinhead.

    Comment by michael — October 2, 2007 @ 7:26 am

  5. Not funny? Not funny? I’ve seen this movie and it’s hilarious! It had all the underdog/Jim Carey elements;

    -the excitement of watching the scale tip in favor of a wardrobe change as the price drops (good guy branching out, growing, taking a chance)
    -the ADD moment when he is distracted by the promise of pain relief and leaves his treasure undefended against the red smocked, unfeeling KMart sentient clearly stocked with a few more chromosomes than he needs (classic good vs evil)
    -the re-evaluation of the lost item and now it’s increased emotional value followed by the frantic search (insert any car chase, herione rescue scene here)
    -our defeated hero never giving up hope, continues his search, but now thinking the grass isn’t always greener and maybe he should just stick to what he knows and be happy (the clincher which makes you love the lead just a little more, if that is even possible)

    I picture all the flannel in his closet giving a standing O as the credits role.

    Comment by Jen — October 2, 2007 @ 10:31 am

  6. I tend to think everyone is right. If you read between the lines you get to where Jennifer got, but if you read all the lines you laugh as both Diane and Jen did, and as I did while writing it. The whole thing is absurd. I don’t need another shirt, and I’d wear the orchids once before Matt teased it off of me.

    But now that I spend so much time either buying things or thinking about buying things I’ve learned to be protective of my cart. I mean, who knew that you needed to carry a placard stating that the thing is still active and hasn’t been abandoned. Whenever I hit Home Depot, the first thing I do is put something in it because I know some guy who thought he was going to buy one thing is now walking around with an armload looking for my empty cart. It’s not like a robbery where you lose something of importance, to be sure, but it irks me when it happens.

    Btw, I was telling Diane this story on Saturday while we were eating lunch at Panera in Leominster, when a young teenager walked by with a cast on each wrist, one pink and one yellow. She reminded me of Emma when she broke hers so I made sure that we left restaurant at the same time so I could commiserate. No, I didn’t know her, it was the mood I was in. In my rush I didn’t bother to look at her face because what began as a simple, “My niece did the same thing and aren’t your casts colorful,” ended with me backing up as her mother said her daughter flew over her handle bars and didn’t only break her wrists but knocked out or otherwise dislodged four teeth. I looked from her casts to the raw skin around her mouth to her re-implanted teeth to the shyest eyes behind narrow glasses that you can imagine.

    What a fucking clown I thought to myself as I tried to disengage.

    Me: “I like the color of your casts. My niece’s were both green.”

    Mom : “We told her that she could direct planes on a runway.” To emphasize the point she held up her hands and motioned back and forth.

    Comment by michael — October 3, 2007 @ 8:46 am

  7. Next time you fall off a ladder, Mike, we’ll find black orchid casts for your wrists.

    Speaking of carts, more than once I’ve grabbed an empty cart at Home Depot, only to have its angry owner appear from nowhere and retake possession. (But I’ve never had a partially filled cart retaken by the establishment!)

    Comment by rakkity — October 3, 2007 @ 12:16 pm

  8. Raise your hand if you’ve every walked away with someone else’s cart with multiple items in it thinking it was yours which you continued to fill with more of items to purchase. Then there is that awkward dividing up of who’s stuff is who’s, followed by the uncomfortable silence when you both say “How’d that (insert personal item here) get in here? I must have grabbed that by mistake mistake because I’ve never had that problem.”

    Um… yeah. That’s never happened to me either.

    Comment by Jen — October 3, 2007 @ 12:40 pm

  9. This shopping cart thing has been a recurrent theme on the blog for quite awhile. Here’s my favorite story gleaned while I was working for a friend of La Rad’s.

    Comment by michael — October 3, 2007 @ 1:03 pm

  10. RIGAL! “Sometimes, when I’m alone, and I’ve latched onto the wrong cart, I keep it. I figure this is the only way I’m going to leave this store with its veritable cornucopia of choices without the same six items I always buy.”

    Well worth a re-read.

    Comment by rakkity — October 3, 2007 @ 3:29 pm

  11. This is great. The thing is, you’ve wasted an hour contemplating various questions which seemed valid at the time (“Do you go through their food aisles and contemplate the black bean salsa vs. the mango salsa and decide to buy both or do you buy neither? Valid questions all.”) and now you have to decide whether to revisit the questions. Someone had the cart (the cart you had and now have again) for a while, so is that votive candle with the Easter bunny motif that you don’t recognize something you thought you wanted or something they thought they wanted?

    I love going to checkout at the supermarket with 3 – 5 items carefully selected to make them guess wrong if they wonder which of those items brought me in here for the emergency trip.

    Comment by Jennifer — October 3, 2007 @ 5:40 pm

  12. Jennifer, Ellen Degeneres has stand up to that effect. “You ever look in the cart of the person behind you and try to figure out what they came in for? They have a toothbrush, douche and a lawnchair.”

    Comment by Jen — October 4, 2007 @ 12:33 pm

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