The Place To Be

Before the door finishes closing behind me, I am immediately overwhelmed by their numbers. Even while moving slowly, and with little deliberation, they seem to somehow swarm throughout the building. Nervousness and claustrophobia set in as they always have, despite my increasing familiarity with the situation. I could turn and leave, probably before anyone notices, but the same thought keeps creeping in, "Just do it, get it over with, like a band aid."

Yet this isn’t like the band aid analogy at all – the process won’t go quickly, and the pain will endure. There’s simply too many of them.

The worst part is the all-too-late realization; the fact that I should know better, and yet somehow find myself in this situation over and over again. I have no one to blame but myself. It’s the same day every week. It’s well advertised. I’ve certainly witnessed it many times before. Yet I never remember what I’m about to walk into until I’m ankle deep in the white-shoes-on-black-socks mess.

I’ve once again found myself in Kroger on Senior Discount Day.

How do I keep doing this? There are six other days of the week in which I could visit the grocery store. Even if I fall into the routine of buying a week’s worth of food, I could go to the store a day ahead of time (Tuesday), or order a pizza and wait one more day (Thursday). The problem is that I don’t always walk in on a Wednesday, which keeps me from remembering that it’s Senior Discount Day on those Wednesdays when I do happen to go to the store. And once there, I’m trapped. The family expects me to return with food.

So I grab a cart and start pushing, mesmerized once again at the popularity of this promotion. Someone working at the deli counter must be calling out bingo numbers.

The trudge through the store, needless to say, is slow. Some aisles contain more people than consumables. Stepping into the fiber aisle is like being on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange if Google suddenly went for 10 cents a share. Cereal will have to wait another day.

Despite only needing items from roughly half the aisles in the store, I always peak down each one as I pass by (habit, I guess). The exception is Wednesdays, when I can’t bring myself to glance in the lane titled "Incontinence."

Upon crossing everything off my list, I head to the front, where the lone retribution for shopping on this day of the week is that, while the checkout lanes are full, the self-checkout stations are empty. Ah, technology - enemy to the elderly. I complete my transaction without delay.

The only obstacle remaining – the parking lot, where interpreting the turn signals is on par with trying to interpret Mandarin Chinese. I somehow make it out unscathed.

So long, seniors.

Until next week…