One grocery aisle over, something heavy hit the floor with a boom. Glass broke, liquid spilled. The store was buzzing with Sunday afternoon shoppers and the aisles were crowded. Thanksgiving Eve crowded or night before a storm crowded. So the silence that fell, after the sound of…I don’t know…a loaded grocery cart tipping over, was just as interesting as the crash.
I was expecting to hear voices. Either an “Are you all right?” or a “Help!” or “How did that entire shelf fall!?” Something. Some kind of panic or scurrying, people moving into action. Oddly, there was just silence. And then whispering. And then nothing. Not even someone in charge, redirecting traffic. Someone in an apron, saying, “Keep moving. There’s nothing to see here.”
Of course I had to push my cart to the end of my aisle and find out what happened. Was someone on the ground? Was someone buried under a shelf of applesauce jars? Surely, someone would break the silence and announce: “Clean up in aisle 6”. Something. But there was just silence, which added to the intrigue.
I looked down the aisle and saw a large case of olive oil toppled over onto its shoulder, the bottles broken at the neck. An unattended puddle of oil expanded like a doily around the box. On her tiptoes, a woman in a plaid skirt reached up for an item on the shelf just over the spill. She didn’t have the shocked look on her face that people get when they knock over a case of olive oil, or a tall pyramid of cantaloupes, or a tower of tampons. She didn’t have the look of someone imploding with humiliation.
She was just going about her business. And so was everyone else. I wondered if this was some sort of Upper Wonderful brainwashing. Blip! It never happened. I rolled my cart down aisles where I actually needed to shop and that’s where I found a group of people who looked related, so they couldn’t have been from a group home, but they had that group home travel pack look. That “we must stay together” look. The Awkward Family outing.
I overheard the oldest member of the party, the mom, I presume, who had a streak of oil going down her plump breast, hiss at the adult son, who looks too old to still be living at home and grocery shopping with the family, “You weren’t paying attention! That’s what happened!”
Frozen next to the cart, while his siblings and mother retrieved items from shelves and shimmied them into vacant pockets of space in the over-full cart, he whispered back weakly, “I didn’t see it. It just fell over.”
The sister returned to the cart with two family-size boxes of pasta, “You weren’t looking where you were going!”
He resigned himself to the role of the clumsy one. The scapegoat. The one the entire family blames for all accidents.
There were four of them altogether. The mom with the oil-stained sweater, the adult son with a wide-eyed, pale face of shame, a boy about 15 and the daughter, who seemed to be the middle child and the black sheep in that her IQ was much higher than the others. She quickly hunted and gathered from a list she had in her mind while the others moved about robotically.
Judging by their glasses, they were indeed family and didn’t come from a group home. Each wore prescription lenses that were probably identical, or within a tenth of a point difference. Thick lenses. The kind that make your eyes look like fish in fishbowl. Strong eye genes, I thought to myself.
They hadn’t moved their cart very far from the spill, as if they were waiting around for the store manager to scold them, or hand them a bill, or a mop and a bucket.
The family looked too rattled for me to interject an ice-breaker. But they sure needed one. I felt badly for them. I wanted to wave a magic wand and make the embarrassment and blame trade places with lighthearted “shit happens” remarks such as: “clean-up in aisle 6!” or “Holy Mary, Mother of God! That thing just jumped right out in front of me!” Something.
If my kids had knocked it down, I wouldn’t have stood only a few feet away from it and berated them. I would have blamed the marketing agency who designed such a top-heavy, precarious display.
There is no place for such an obstacle in a grocery store on a busy Sunday. I look at that accident and think: “Let that be a lesson to the designers who failed to calculate aisle width and traffic. Life is too short to blame yourself for not fitting into a world that doesn’t fit you.
Subscribe to the
RSS feed or 
Email Updates.Help us promote this article by bookmarking it to your favorite social network via an icon below:
Amazing as always
I am shocked to learn that it wasn’t myself and/or my children knocking over the display, but alas, we were causing havoc elsewhere.
HA! My son and I went shopping on Sunday and we tested the sturdiness of all the cardboard displays. Couldn’t help ourselves.
I really do wonder about displays sometimes!
I recall a jar of mayo attacking one day in the grocery store, or did it just slip out of my hands; either way, it managed to smash & plop/squirt from one side of the aisle to the other. Echos of “the lady with all the kids made the mess on aisle 3″ haunt me to this day. I’m just glad they didn’t blame the kids!
Awesome blog! Love the three column template…I am afraid to try to make mine the column. Your writing is very funny.
I can only assume that the 65 year old clean up guy had slipped out back, behind the dumpster, for a few Marlboros and a shot of Smirnoff while all of this was going on. I’ll bet he wasn’t as understanding as you, when he came back from his break. (We are in a tough economy and Social Security doesn’t go as far as it used to. Also, High School kids quit doing that kind of work years ago.) Nice Post!
So THAT’S where all the help went. You’re good, Bobby.
Shocking that no one would come. Isn’t it a strange balance between personal responsibility and the grocery store precariously balancing foods so that it’s a miracle any mom can make it through the store without taking out multiple displays.
Reminds me of a recent journey to a store that had child size carts… of course I needed two. Unfortunately my youngest got the cart with the bad wheel. So he was zig zagging through the store like a drugged panther… he nearly took out a wine display.
Luckily, gravity was defied and we were saved!
A drugged panther. Love it. I hate those little carts. My kids used to run into the back of my ankles with those.
hmmm…. are you positive you haven’t been back here to see the “upgrades” they’ve been doing to the old A&P ???
)
I swear I saw the exact same family have a run-in with the Juice Aisle about 2 days ago….
oh well… great minds think alike… (and so do ours
LOL!
You have a way of transporting your reader. I felt like I was right there in that store. Another really entertaining glimpse of life!
Hey Amy! LOVE the most recent post there about the spill…too many times I see parents scolding their kids instead of supporting them through embarrassment…keep up the great work!
Been there. With four kids, we’ve had many of these moments in the store. I hate to admit, I’ve been on both ends — the berating and the understanding — depending on my level of exhaustion at the time.
Yeah, I would agree…I wouldn’t stay in the aisle…I’d be in the checkout or as far away from the scene of the crime as possible.
Ditto. My instinct would be to skidaddle! I think I have everything on the list now!! Bye! Then I’d whisper to the cashier to get someone to clean up a big spill in aisle #__. Wherever I’d been.
Been there done that and it was vinegar. Yuck, what a smell drifted over the store. I felt bad, but I was as careful as I could be when pulling out the balsamic vinegar bottle next to this bottle, but it was too tightly and precariously packed onto the shelf for me to make a clean jerk of the bottle. I also was never very good at Jenga either. Great post!
Love that imagery with the clean jerk and jenga! Ha! I know what you mean. Stealthy fingers.
Nicely put! I wish everybody had as much senstivity and compassion.I don’t think we have to be so perfect all the time or be berated for small mistakes that one might make.
Wonderful!!! I love it!!!