As adults, responsibilities are heaped on our shoulders from everywhere. Home, work, friends, family; it never stops. There is lots of fun and good stuff too, but this is not about that.
If you spill something, you wipe it up. If it needs sweeping, you have to sweep it up; I don’t always do it but you guys probably do. My standards skim nicely along the gutter most of the time and as long as no one drops in unannounced, we’re golden.
So we all go day to day, acting like the adults that we are and that is just how it is.
But a few months ago, I was lurking in Walmart, just buying stuff, loading up my cart and one of the items I chose to accompany me home was a jar of pickles. I love pickles. They are a must with a tuna or salmon sandwich. They have to be there if I am having cheese and crackers. A melted cheese sandwich cannot be eaten without pickles. Period.
Dill pickles are my favorite. Extra garlic will always do quite nicely.
So this jar of pickles was added to the upper tier of my cart and I was strolling around through a very open area of the store when the jar somehow toppled off the cart and hit the floor, smashing to bits, sending glass and pickles flying everywhere.
The adult in me looked around wildly for something to use to clean up the mess. To be honest, I was actually a bit at surprised at how quickly that adult version of me surfaced. And maybe a little disappointed.
Then there was the other side of me that noticed what a satisfying sound that jar made when it hit the cement; that smashing noise it made and the pickles flying all over someone else’s floor. Like, right-on. NOT MY PROBLEM. Oh, settle down, that only lasted for about an hour, and then it went away, but it was kind of cool.
So back to the pesky adult. I was looking around wildly for something to use to clean it up, and because I was in the open area, there were quite a few staff members around who couldn’t ignore the pickle apocalypse that had just occurred. A couple of them came over and one of them had this little plastic thing that he placed over the biggest portion of the offending jar, like he was tenting it so no one had to see the carcass.
I asked if they had something for me to clean it up with and they said, OH NO, WE WILL CLEAN THIS UP, DON’T YOU WORRY ABOUT A THING.
What was this Fuckery now? Do you know when the last time was that I heard that? When I was 2.
So I just joined the rest of the bystanders who had stopped to watch the horror, and I just rested my arms on my cart handle, bent over, took a load off, and watched the clean-up. I believe at one point I may have even gestured to a piece of glass that they had missed by pointing my finger and waving it up and down. Seniors get to do that whenever they want.
I also may have looked over at another shopper and said SOMEONE DROPPED A HUGE JAR OF PICKLES; WATCH FOR GLASS, enjoying the look of shock and fear on her face.
As someone else walked by with their cart I said PICKLES. JAR. GLASS EVERYWHERE. VERY DANGEROUS. I HEAR GIRALDO IS COMING TO EXCAVATE. I was having a ball.
Once everything was swept up and the pickle corpses removed, the tent taken away, the muttering died down, the crowd broken up, and Giraldo had left empty handed again, I realized it was time to move on and I straightened up and went back to my shopping.
I headed back over to the pickles. I picked up another jar and as I held it, I kind of longed to hear that smashing sound again, that feeling of having a team rush in to take that responsibility away from me and know that, like a kid, I wouldn’t have to do anything more than stand back and watch. It was tempting. But I wasn’t going to get away with it a second time. At least not today, anyway.