Is It Time Yet?

It is the first week of April and that means two things: yard clean up and prom shopping. The first, yard clean up, is a necessary chore.  It has been a long, cold and windy winter. Since my house is on a corner lot, and only a block from a multitude of stores and gas stations, there seems to be a lot to clean up. 

I didn’t keep an accurate tally, but I picked up a multitude of old soda pop bottles, a few beer cans, a host of cigarette packs and an assortment of lottery tickets.  Needless to say, the bottles and cans were empty, as were the cigarette packs. And if there was a doubt, every single one of the lottery tickets was a loser. Every. Single. One.

I found this to be rude. If you are going to deposit your personal property on my personal property at least make it personally profitable for me to put your stuff where it belongs.

This complete disregard for my labor in keeping my yard clean left me in a funk. To alleviate that funk, I decided to do some therapeutic shoe shopping. Note, the shopping wasn’t for shoes that are therapeutic, it was the shopping that was meant to be therapeutic.

For my long time friends and readers, you know that I find nothing therapeutic about shopping. I do, however, find spending time with my family therapeutic. Beloved, Middlest, Littlest, and I went to the mall. The young ladies went shopping for shoes for their respective proms.

While they were looking for new soles, I took my watch to a jeweler for a quick fix. After I handed my timepiece to the kind gentleman behind the counter, he said the repair would be done in about 15 minutes. I, out of the force of habit, looked at my wrist to see what time it was, so I would know when to pick the watch up. Then I looked at the kind gentleman behind the counter, and we both laughed at my epic fail.

While I waited for the womenfolk to pick out the right shoes and my watch to be repaired, I sat out on a bench in the mall. I was facing one of the kiosks that sells mediocre jewelry at bargain basement prices. There was a young couple shopping for some bling. The male part of the couple sat on a bench near me, while the female looked over all the shiny stuff.

After a few moments, the female came around from the far side of the kiosk and yelled in the most romantic way possible while shopping at a mall and looking at mediocre jewelry, “Hey, what you last name be again?”

Upon hearing that crime committed against grammar and the English language, I looked at my wrist to see if it was time to pick up my watch yet. The watch was still at the jewelers and had not magically reappeared on my wrist.

My family, however, did magically reappear and declared that despite the enormous square footage of the shoe store, there were simply no prom shoes to be had and so, we continued to shop. And shop. While I repeatedly checked my wrist to see if it was time to leave yet.