Dear H-E-B shopper guy,
When you blocked the entrance fiddling with your phone and I tried to get around you — first on your right then on your left — I was holding my breath as we had to pass like 2 feet from each other.
No problem — you went right when I went right, and as luck would have it, you then also went left when I went left.
No issues. I took a breath when I speed-walked safely into that big humanless hole by the magazine rack just beyond you.
What I wanted to talk to about, though, was the peanut butter aisle. As my good Lord knows — because I pray to him every night to find just one jar left — my tribe is hurting for peanut butter. Organic preferably, but we’ll take what we can get in wartime. While I kept a nice fast pace through cheeses and frozen chicken zones, I had to slow down at the PB aisle. We have almond butter, pumpkin seed butter, cookie butter (I’ll have to address getting butter from cookies later). It’s a quagmire, sir. Mostly strange stuff, but maybe — just maybe — a lone jar of PB.
It doesn’t look like you have a gaggle of children hanging on your ankles/ couches/ bank accounts as you’re nice and young and have that self-care look about you, but perhaps you do and you also needed a W this week to balance out all of those losses when you tuck your tail in the walk of shame back into your house like I do these days without the little ingrates’ favorites.
So you caught me at a weak moment — the air around my person was stagnant and I could feel my 6-foot radius being encroached. Sure enough, through my peripheral, there you were again. My socially oblivious buddy. And so I did with any courteous COVID-19 shopper does — I moved out of your radius even though you had moved into mine. I moved left and forward but then the unthinkable happened. You moved left and forward, too. This was my only chance to find the PB, sir. I’m holding my breath, gripping the only two products I could find for my people in my hands — no germy basket — losing my grip on those products because of the sanitizer dripping between my fingers and the products, and wondering if you have an internet plan. Because you’re certainly not on Team Flatten. If I go left and forward, that means you go right and back. See? We’re communicating, the new way. It also means back off – I got to the PB first — but nicer.
Alas, there was no PB, and you managed to find me yet again in the protein bar aisle — because there are traces of PB in there. I juked you this time with a little twirl and sneaked out of that 6-foot arc like a champ, letting my breath go and inhaling again finally by the sushi counter. It’s nothing personal, I promise. There’s just a little bug floating around — it’s a long story. Just know that there was a certain amount of nostalgia for the old days in our awkward dance as I dodged your social distancing party fouls. Hopefully, if nothing else we can all take away a few social IQ points here in our new normal.
Just remember: I go left, and you go right. Mmkay?
I’m glad we had this talk.
Your fellow shopper,
Me
Christie Turner Schultz is a dream-chasing, volunteering, boo-boo kissing working mom of four, juggling diapers and driver’s learning permits in Westlake.
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