A comedy of errors

One of the things a parent looks forward to when a son or daughter gets a driver's license is being able to send him/her to the store for a couple of items while said parent stays home to fix dinner. I got my first opportunity to do this while fixing Sunday dinner. We needed milk, a bag of ice, and bananas, so I sent Daniel to our closest grocery store, Apple Market, just a half mile from our house.

Daniel left for the store and I worked on getting dinner on the table while he was gone. After things were pretty much almost ready, the thought crossed my mind that it was taking Daniel a little longer than I expected to get three things, but I wasn't worried or concerned. He soon came in the door, handing me the milk and the bag of ice. Then the story began.

Apparently one thing that a parent needs to remember is that 1) new drivers don't always go the same route to the store as the parent might and 2) not everyone is as familiar with the location of items in the grocery store. (Now, let me stop and say that Daniel was telling this story on himself and gave me permission to blog about it.)

He said that first of all, he had chosen to take a left turn out of our street to take Brewer Drive to the store. There are three ways to get to Nolensville Road from our house, all would take him to the store, but this way he chose was probably the most difficult, requiring a left-hand turn across the four-lane road. After waiting quite a bit to make the turn, he ended up turning right, cutting through the bowling alley parking lot, and came back down Brewer, turned on the street that goes by our house and finally took the quickest route to the store.

Once inside the store, he wasn't sure about my advice to just tell the cashier that he was buying ice and decided to pick out the bag BEFORE he went looking for the milk. With the bag of ice under his arm, he walked the perimeter of the store looking for the dairy case. At one point, he was right next to it, but looking in the wrong direction, and not seeing milk, took off circling the store again.

When he finally made it home with the milk and ice (he gave up on bananas), he explained why his "quick trip" to the store had taken so long. I was putting the ice away while listening to his story, emptying some of it into the ice bin and then kept the rest in the bag to save for later. As I was putting the opened bag of ice on the freezer shelf, somehow it spilled out a big pile of ice onto the floor.

That's really things really got fun! Have you ever tried to pick up melting ice? I got the mop and we worked on corralling the ice into one pile and then scooped it up with towels to get it off the floor. That's also when the laughter began, since Daniel was telling me about his walking around the store with a bag of ice under his arm while I was scooping ice off the floor.

Good thing we both have a good sense of humor!