Easy Shopper

I was talking to my mom the other day, and she told me that she "didn't want to be considered disabled". Now my mother is eighty six years old, she still drives, lives alone, and her mind and her eyes are as clear as when she was twenty six. Her problem is her knees, they are apparently worn out. The fact that she carried eleven children for nine months each, then again for months after they were born, might have something to do with that.

Today I went grocery shopping with Mark for the first time since my foot surgery. I instructed him to take us to the 'big' Publix supermarket, because they have the electric carts that I always see obese people riding around in. After he dropped me off at the front entrance, I hobbled in and grabbed one of the electric carts. After a few starts and stops and a close call with an old mans foot, I was on my way through the store. So this is what it is like to be crippled, I thought, as I zipped by elderly ladies slowly making their way through the aisles with the aid of only a cane or walker. Each one seemed to be giving me the evil eye as I passed them, probably saying to themselves, "what a wimp".

Shopping from only three feet off the ground is a totally different experience than I am used to. For one thing you can't see the overhead signs until you get all the way to the end of the aisle, this required me to double back more than once. It's funny how much of an ass you can make out of yourself doing a U-turn in a grocery store aisle, and nobody says anything because you are 'handicapped'.

The people who put these places together are definitely marketing to a different crowd at the three foot level. In the cereal aisle I was suddenly aware of all the sweetened, fruit flavored, cereals that are packaged like a child's comic book, with all sorts of come-ons that no four year old can resist. One thing that I did notice at that level, is that a lot of the products are cheaper than the big name equivalents higher up the shelves.

I hope that the last two weeks aren't a harbinger of things to come a few years down the road. I, like my mom, don't want to end up 'disabled'. It clearly cuts into your independence, and being unable to get out to a nice tavern on a Friday night would make me crazy. I think I'm going to start saving for that expensive wheel chair I told Dennis I would get some day. The one with the seat that lifts you up to the same level as everybody else at the bar