When Anger And Gum Meet

After posting my last social blight, I think it only makes sense to keep the spirit with another.

I went to the grocery store around lunch a couple of weeks ago. Because of the lunch crowd, it was unusually busy. Almost all of the parking spaces were full. I'm not the type to avoid walking from the farther part of the lot (ok, sometimes I am, but was really not in this case), but rather I tend to look for the spaces that are closest to the cart returns. That way, I can both dump my youngest child into the cart on the way in, and easily dump the cart off on my way out. My goal is to avoid walking across the lot to return a cart with two distracted kids in tow.

I see a lone vacant spot that is 1) close to the front and 2) close to a cart return. As I pull up closer to it, I see that the reason this too-good-to-be-true space is vacant is because the doofus on the left has parked way over the yellow line. And just to make things even more difficult, the car on the right is very close to the yellow line. Whether you call it voracious determination or idiotic spite, I was going to park there. And, 15 minutes later, I did just that. Now the small matter of squeezing my family out. Somehow, by way of sucking in guts and lifting children over the roofs of Mustangs, we had succeeded. I certainly felt we were deserving of a pack of Twizzlers after all that maneuvering because of some selfish dumb-dumbs.

After our shopping was complete, I left the store and headed for our car. But before noticing the car, I notice the gaggle of construction workers staring at me with smirks. Truth be told, I thought I was getting the eyeball. And maybe I kind of even sort of liked it. My hips swung a little more than they usually do, and I tenderly held Fiona's hand as I smiled at these otherwise goofy men. What can I say, the last guy to check me out was a man who was restocking shelves at Walgreen's a few years ago. I was flattered.

Once my attention had returned to the matter of unloading groceries and children, I was greeted with a note stuck to my rear window, which read:

HEY ASSHOLE!
LEARN HOW TO PARK!
F--K YOU!

My boyfriends (a.k.a construction workers on their lunchbreaks) are now giggling like schoolgirls. They weren't checking me out at all. No, they had something to do with this note.

Me: "Hey, do you guys know anything about this?"

One of the gaggle: "Yeah, it was some real mad lady who was pissed she had to squeeze into her car."

Me: "Did she see the car that was parked like 3 feet over the yellow line on my left? I'm in the yellow lines!"

One of the gaggle: "No. That car wasn't here when she came out."

I look over, and sure as their Mountain Dew is flourescent yellow, the flippin' Mustang that was practically taking a nap in my spot had left. This, naturally, left my car looking as if to have been parked by a blind child.

Me: "Well, I know my car looks crazy, but I had to park it like that because of the other dummies that parked next to me." (I'm doing my best to use words like 'dummy' and 'stinker' in front of my kids, along with trying not to raise my voice.)

One of the gaggle: "She was mad. She asked us to stay here and tell you that she was the one who wrote that."

Me: "And you agreed? Do you know her? If I asked you to stay here and wait for her to come back next week and tell her that I was mad too, would you do it?"

One of the gaggle: "No. She was just yelling and stuff. And then she spit her gum onto the paper and stuck it to your car. We were all, 'Ohhhhhh!'"

That crazy hag of a woman attached her cowardly note to my car with her nasty DoubleMint gum! I even came down with a case of the angry lip quiver- the most embarrassing reaction to someone being mean to you ever. Before this grown woman, the same woman who still parked between the yellow lines although on a slight diagonal, started crying in front of her wide eyed children and pack of sub-eating, Mountain Dew-drinking monkeys, I felt it best to unload the groceries quietly... as if I was the calm sane beneficiary of some hilariously rediculous chain of events. Yes, I kept thinking, you are lucky to have experienced something so stupid, something funny to tell Terry on the way home. Dammit, lip, stop trembling!

When I returned the cart to the cart return, the gaggle still stood there, staring at me, while chomping on their mayonnaise-soaked subs. (Apparently the villains in my story love mayo, as I just made that part up.) This time I was pretty certain that my hip saunter had nothing to do with their stares. I was just one half of the abstract cat fight these men witnessed on their lunch break. I'm sure it was almost as good as watching female wrestling, give or take a few extra garments of clothes, the women actually coming in contact with each other, and some DoubleMint gum.

The kicker?

One of the gaggle: "She said that if she saw your car around town, she was going to go crazy on your shit."

Me: "What does that mean?"

One of the gaggle: "I don't know. She was crazy mad though."

Me: "Was she threatening me? What is wrong with this woman?"

The gaggle at large: (laughing)

Me: "Heh." (Dera, bite that wimpy lip before it starts trembling again.)

The carride home was silent. The various dialogs played over and over in my head, as I tried to imagine confronting the woman in the parking lot. Would I take the Ghandi approach, killing her DoubleMint gum notes with kindness? Or would I have said,

"Ho, you touch my car and so help me I will squirt you in the eye with this juice box!"

Once the fear of being seen by this psycho faded, once the fear of her "going crazy on my sh-t" subsided, and once my dumb baby bottom lip stopped shaking, I realized how funny the whole thing was. I'm also more cautious in assuming that smirking construction workers are out for my body. Especially when I'm wearing a sweatshirt, holding an enormous child, and lifting a 4 lb. Boston Butt out of my cart.