I haven’t been to Wal-Mart in months. I’m not a Wal-Mart shopper to start with, and not in any snobby kind of way. I’m seriously not a fan of the general shopping experience, anyway, but I am especially averse to crowded spaces where people push and clog up aisles for no seemingly logical reason and generally make themselves obnoxious. In other words, I prefer not to be inside a warehouse with people of questionable sanity, many of whom are wearing pajamas.
So, when a friend asks if I’d like to go to Wal-Mart, I
figure, hey, why not, I haven’t been in months (perhaps longer). We are only
searching for a few list items, so it shouldn’t be too torturous. We circle the
inside of the store a couple of times trying to locate the things we need. At
one point a woman asks if I know where the wrapping paper is. I don’t, but I
send her in the direction of school supplies and hope for the best.
After finding some of the things we need and not finding others, we end up in the pet section. My friend needs kitty litter and cat treats (yes, for her cat – we are the sane ones shopping in W-ville). Suddenly, a quick but strange movement catches my eye. I look up to the end of the pet food aisle where there is a large sign for a particular brand of animal chow.
Squatting on the sign high above the oblivious shoppers, a
bird has landed. The pet food sign, of all places, proving that there really is intelligent life in Wal-Mart. Of
course, that intelligent life would be a bird, but it restores my faith in
Wal-Mart.
Best of all (yes, even better than the pet food mascot), we
don’t see anyone wearing their pajamas as we weave our way into a check-out
lane . . . directly behind the woman I ran into earlier.
“Did you find the wrapping paper?” I ask.
“Exactly where you said it might be!”
“Oh,” I say, “thank goodness. And thank you for thinking I
might look smart enough to know. That really means a lot.”
She nodded knowingly. These are the little treasures of
Wal-Mart, little nuggets of alternate reality that Wal-Mart may not be the
portal to the complete and utter failure of humanity (or the bird population)
as we know it.
