Safeway

RantMom is perking along really well with recovery from her knee replacement. This is good because RantMom was Out of Toilet Paper--and a few other things. RantMom has done a couple short shopping trips in friends' cars, but she needs to be able to walk herself. She has not done so since her surgery--until yesterday.

Yesterday she was determined to march over to Safeway, just a few blocks away to restock. Well she was determined to do it, but she still wanted backup from her porter, aka RantWoman. RantWoman is a sucker for free lunch and a big cheerleader for plucky vigorous RantMom. RantWoman's finely-honed sense of adventure had also forgotten about many adventure angles lurking in the average supermarket. Two on RantWoman's mind include Shopping Carts and Are You My Mother?

Take shopping carts. Here I mean two models, carts owned by the public and supermarket shopping carts. RantMom has a wonderful wheeled walker with a carrying shelf, but she did not want to use it. She just wanted her cane. To be fair, the volume of her purchases wound up being more than the walker could handle. RantMom also has a colapsible shopping cart, but it suffers from handles too short that wind up being hard on her back. RantMom instead proposed to borrow a shopping cart from her building.

Well, supermarkets would generally prefer that their customers not take shopping carts. Really determined supermarkets install wheel locks so the shopping carts cannot wander away. In some places where RantWoman has lived, shopping carts come pre-printed with warnings about what part of the legal code is violated when shopping carts wander away from their home venues.

Despite these measures, urban shopping carts wander away exuberantly. The shopping carts decamp to bus stops. They migrate to customers' homes. Sometimes they even become customers' homes. RantMom lives in a building with many other seniors and sometimes shopping carts wander into their parking garage. Apparently, to hear RantMom talk, the enterprising elders have even figured out a couple lacunae in the store's shopping cart preservation grid.

Bear in mind, RantMom is the kind of lady who formerly might not even have wanted to know how to evade the supermarket shopping cart preservation grid. RantWoman has to try not to let her eyes get to the size of saucers as RantMom is outlining the exact options. "Mom," RantWoman has to say, "just tell me how to do it when we get there." RantWoman has vision of getting busted with a contraband wayward shopping cart, our various mobility devices, and a whole mountain of toilet paper.

The universe had other ideas. The shopping cart available in RantMom's parking garage was of a completely different color from a completely different store. We would have no worries one way or the other using it at Safeway. So much the better and a perfect prop for Are You My Mother?