You can tell a lot about a person when you’re waiting behind them in the checkout line. Ideally, you wouldn’t have so much time to inspect the stuff they’re buying, but that’s what happens when Target decides to close down every register, but three – and one is only still open because the nervous cashier-boy can’t meet the coupon-related demands of a blonde woman with a 36-roll pack of toilet paper in her cart.
I line up with my four items behind a guy. Guys don’t buy much. Unfortunately, my calculations prove to be incorrect this time. His cart looked empty, but it was only deceptively so, because he’s got a boatload of tiny items.
I can’t decide if he’s a health nut or a health fad believer. He is buying every sort of vitamin and strange health gel imaginable. So maybe he just really digs green tea and yoga and stuff like that. But he’s also buying fish oil. I don’t know about you, but I get annoyed every time I hear those fish oil commercials on the radio. It just sounds like a scam.
Or maybe I’m wrong. I just looked it up on WebMD and apparently fish oil has omega-3 fatty acids that are good for heart conditions and stuff like that. Oh man, I hope he doesn’t have a heart condition, after I stood there at Target mocking him for buying into health fads. But I think I ended up concluding that he was more health nut for the long run, anyway.
He’s lanky for 40 – like maybe he runs every morning or doesn’t eat any butter. He probably has a glass of red wine every night for its health benefits.
He’s starting to grow on me. I’ve practically forgiven him for having a deceptively large pile, when a woman cuts me in line and sets a book down. I know that you can do that in stores, but anywhere else they would have been booed for line-cutting.
The book is “Bossypants” by Tina Fey. I’ve only read excerpts of it on Amazon – because I’m a cheapskate – but the parts I read were pretty funny, although it wasn’t as much fun as “30 Rock.” But this woman looks like she might prefer that.
She’s very clean-looking. You know, like the kind of person whose kitchen counters always sparkle. If I looked at her nails I bet they wouldn’t be painted, but there wouldn’t be a speck of dirt under them, either.
Her curly, brown hair is short and neat. Not trophy wife scary-perfect, just I-want to-look-presentable-so-you’ll-listen-to-me-talk-about-my-organic-garden perfect. I see some TRESemmé curly-hair gel in their stack of stuff. She probably uses it to keep her hair looking so unassuming.
At first I think Curls and Lanky-dude are husband and wife, and I think they’re one of those couples that progressively start to look and act more alike as their marriage goes on.
But when she starts to talk, her voice seems young, so it might be his daughter. I bet if I ever talked to them, they’d be really nice to me. I hope they never read this.
