Beginnings and Baggers

Disclaimer:

This blog is for practice.  Just wanted to warn everyone.  I love to write.  It has been a dream of mine, since I was a wee girl, to write a book.  However, I have written very little in the last 12 years.  Naturally, if you don’t do something for 12 years, you’re going to be out of practice.   Hence, the warning.  So, if you’re wanting to read something really eloquent and literary, come back in 10 years or so.  I may be old(er) and senile by then, but maybe, just maybe, I will be a better writer at the least, and perhaps an author at the most.

That being said, I will give you another word of warning about the proposed content of my blog.  Wait for it….there isn’t one.  I am a thinker and a wonderer.  I think of a good many things in my spare time on this planet, and a lot of those thoughts cause a lot of noise rattling around in my head.  I will write about those things.  And about things I know.  It’s all fair game.  Some of my thoughts right  now could be, “Why do people drool on their pillows at night?”,   and “How come you get more fearful as you get old?”, and “Why do some people have tons of hair on their head and some don’t?”, and “What is the hardest job in the world?”, and even “Why, as soon as your kids grow up into nice, responsible human beings, do they move out; can’t we dispose of them sooner and have them come back when they are less hostile?”.   Yeah, topics like that, and even topics that I am a near expert on, like, “How to apologize without really apologizing”, or “How to tell off your daughter’s boyfriend”.   I am open to taking suggestions too, from my readers.  If I have any.

For now; for this very first post, I would like to talk about BAGGERS (hiss, boo!) at the grocery store.  A little background.  I live in the big long state of California, up at the northern end.  And for those of you who are not geography wizards, San Francisco is NOT northern California, and neither is Sacramento.  It’s above that.  It’s the part that no one knows about.  Small towns, forests, ranches and ranchers, miles and miles of open country, where citizens rarely care about the latest fashion except in camouflage, and where the “right to carry” is sacred.  I digress.  There is a reason to my rambling. 
Recently CA passed a law that did away with free bags in stores.  You have to bring your own or pay $.10 a bag.  Naturally I bring my own bag (BYOB).  I have several large nylon reinforced bags that I love and use each time.

 And every blasted time I take these to the grocery store, the BAGGER (hiss, boo!) thinks he must fill it to the top with all the heavy stuff.  Stuff like full milk and dairy cartons, heads of cauliflower and cabbages, cans of garbanzo beans, 5 lb bags of organic bread flour bottles of Caesar dressing and even an occasional kumquat.  Then the BAGGER (hiss, boo!), will look at me with a smirk and give this overflowing bag a “test heft”, then grin and say, “yeah, I think that’s ok”.  And I’m like, “HELLOOO!!  Can’t you see I’m a senior citizen?  Can you see these flabs on my arms that USED TO BE  muscles?  Are you some kind of masochist?”  Then he sets the 10-ton bag in my cart while stifling a groan of his own and says, “you got this, right?”  And, since I want to appear young and tough, like any near 60 yr. old lady, I smile and wheel my 20-ton cart (because there are 2 10-ton bags) out to my snazzy yellow jeep where I groan and curse all BAGGERS, because I am sure he is peeking out the store window with his binoculars and rolling on the floor laughing with all his bagger buddies, while I am trying to brace my feet and with 2 arms and a “Heave, ho”, catapulting those  50-ton (oops, I meant 10-ton) grocery bags into the tiny back seat of the jeep. 

 And all the while I am wondering, “WHY?”.

I am positive that on employment applications for grocery store baggers, there is a line that asks, “Do you have a sick sense of humor that would allow you to enjoy torturing old people by OVER-loading their bags?”.

Yep, that would explain it.