Unemployed

I am constantly surprised when I go out these days and find that the stores, malls, banks and other businesses in general are empty. I am now able to get things done more quickly while everyone else is at work.

I’ve never been a stay at home mom before. I have always worked. I liked working, it gave structure to my day, and it gave me something to bitch about. So now Aidric and I have to make our own structure and I find new things to bitch about.

Like grocery shopping for instance. I now shop with the senior brigade and I'm not talking your average retirees, no sir, these are honest to goodness octogenarians, or older. Yup, I hit the grocery store right after our morning visit to the YMCA. Which puts us inside Vons right around 11-ish, me sweaty and smelly and Aidric crabby and ready for his nap. It seems that the only other customers in the store at that time of day are the old people and sometimes they are also smelly and cranky and ready for their nap. I think that the local assisted living place must drop the lot of them off by the bus full at the same time every day.

I love the old people as much as the next person, but sometimes they work my last nerve. They double park their carts in the middle of an aisle while they chat about the fiber content of peaches. They berate the butcher because the price of the beef is too high and the labels are lettered too small to read. They harass the guy stocking shelves because the bran cereals are on the top shelf and they can’t reach them and the sugary cereals are on the bottom shelf and they can’t bend down to reach them either. They park their carts in the middle of the aisle while they read labels with a magnifying glass and are annoyed if you move their cart aside for them.

I, being young and of able body, have been enlisted to help reach things on the high shelves and the low shelves. I have been pressed into to service to read the sodium content of a can of sardines (just put them back on the shelf lady, you don’t want to know.) I have been roped in to interpret what the produce manager has just said to them, i.e. I speak louder and point. And on more than one occasion I’ve stepped in to help them with the new technology of card readers at the checkout, all the while listening to a ‘in my day’ rant.

On the other hand, they love Aidric and pat him and talk to him and tell me how handsome he is. They pat me and thank me and tell me I’m pretty. One old guy made Aidric laugh by speaking to him ‘in his own language’. Aidric and the old guy spoke gibberish back and forth to each other the whole time we waited at the checkout, Aidric loved it.

I could shop later, like after Aidric’s nap, but then I’d miss the old people and I’d have to shop with the soccer moms and they REALLY irritate me.