Have you ever had an accidental shopping buddy? They arrive at the grocery store within minutes of you, and your cruising algorithms fall into step with each other's. Up and down the aisles you go, accidentally winding up in front of the pickles at the same time as each other, simultaneously selecting salad greens and jelly. It is often an interesting glimpse into the life of a complete stranger.

I had a whole family as accidental shopping buddies today: a tall, square shouldered youngish man and his wife, their small daughter, and the woman's sister. The man was a bit loud, and I gathered that he was a recently decommissioned officer, a Marine, home (hopefully for good) recently. He and his wife and sister-in-law were engaging in the plebeian task of grocery shopping, but they were having more fun at it than I have had in a good long time. Although finding myself in the same aisles as them every single time, we were on alternate routes, so our carts crisscrossed each other's about ten or twelve times.

Each pass, I couldn't help but overhear snips of their conversation, patches of laughter seemingly out of place in the sterile red-and-white of our local Meijer. I never caught exactly what was so funny- maybe it was several things- but I did hear them prank calling another relative on their cell phone, then roaring in laughter at the result of this.

In the pasta aisle, something tickled their funnybone so bad that they literally startled the entire aisle of shoppers with their laughter. It wasn't raucous or drunken laughter, just pure fun with a touch of insanity. The man laughed until he had to wipe tears away from his eyes, a full-bodied belly laugh that I can still hear.
I ran into them again, five minutes later, standing in front of the yogurt. The man had just finished another good hearty blowup of hilarity and was once again wiping tears from his eyes. He shook his head, passed a thick hand over the small circle of hair on top of his head, and mumbled the quietest thing I'd heard from him yet:

"God, I hope I don't have to go back."
His wife sobered and put her hand on his arm, her lips white. I grabbed blindly at a container of cottage cheese and darted down another aisle.

I hope he doesn't have to go back either.

I've laughed like that before, and it was only after a particularly nightmarish time in my life. The laughter cleansed the past weeks away, veiled the worries that still lay hidden inside my soul, and drowned memories.

Who knows what horrors that man saw. Who knows what emotion he's been through, what panic greeted him every morning. I don't even know if he was in Iraq. I know nothing about him beyond what I gleaned by accident. All I know is that he is home, and he is safe, and he is healthy. He has his wife and his child back, and a cell phone on which to make prank calls. He has cereal and yogurt and barbeque sauce and cheese and Ziploc bags- synonymous of normalcy. He has laughter that masks any terror that he might not be able to talk about yet.

Wherever you are, belly-laughing decommissioned Marine: I thank you for your service to this country. I don't agree with the war anymore, haven't for a few years now, but I appreciate each and every person who has trudged through the sand and mud and sun to honor the commitments that they made.
I hope that you come back safe, with your families and your world intact.
I hope that this nightmare ends soon and none of you have to go back over there, ever.
And I hope that when you come home, that you are able to laugh just a little bit softer, knowing that there are no terrors to drown out any more.

Labels: groceries, grocery, home, hope, Iraq, laughter, Marine, Marines, return, Semper Fi, Semper Fidelis, shopping, war

I didn't mean to make her fall down.

My sisters and I grew up in a rather repressive household. My father was, I believe, severely bipolar. In his 'downswings' he hated to hear noise of any kind, especially laughter. So in those times we learned to keep quiet, stuff a lot inside ourselves.

Then he would have moments of rage, where there would be frenzied activity, arguing, yelling, etc. Because of his charismatic personality, this would rub off on all of us and we'd all fight and holler.

But during his 'upswings' there was a general air of hilarity and noise. Laughter was suddenly ok again, the dam would break on our emotions, and we'd all go a little nuts with jokes, pranks, whatever we could get away with until his next episode of melancholy.

All of this conditioned us to be just a tad unstable. We have this freak humor that bursts out of us, often at inappropriate times, and frightens people around us. Unfortunately (I think) we feed off of that startled reaction and have come to look for it.

I guess all of this is more or less a pack of excuses for my inexcusable behavior. After prank calling got boring, we got into the habit of what I like to call 'drive-by prank assault'. It's stupid, really, and quite common. Driving down the street of our small town, we'd spot a group of people waiting in line outside of the movie theater and that emotional glitch would kick in. Rolling the window, we'd lean out and scream in our best lunatic voice,
"WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!"

Heads would turn, blank startled faces momentarily visible through the window would send us off into peals of maniacal laughter. We'd drive on down the road, laughing at our own stupidity, snorting at the memory, coming up with new ideas...

From chicken clucks directed at random pedestrians to undecipherable apocalyptic prophecy, our immaturity knew few bounds. To our credit (and probably due to the sheltered upbringing that we mentioned) I don't think we ever unleashed any profanity or coarseness. I don't even think we actually injured people or insulted them directly, just scared the crap out of them while they went about minding their own business.

This habit morphed into the usual goon prank of waving at a complete stranger, eliciting the 'huh?' response. We could never predict when it would strike, but the urge would hit, and there would go that irrepressible idiot urge.

One day as I was leaving the mall that housed our current failure-in-the-making, I was a bit wired and needed to blow off steam. I cannot remember who was in the car with me- might have been a sister, my mom, a friend. There was a woman crouched on the curb, tying her shoelace.

She was a simple enough looking soul, wearing a pink sweater, pastel purse strapped around her torso, ready to go shop. As I pulled up near her, I beeped the horn and waved frantically. She half turned her head, grinned, and lifted one hand up to wave back, not actually knowing who in the hell I was. As her body- perched on one and a half feet- left its center of gravity in order to move her right arm, it began to tip. I remember watching, hoping it wasn't actually going to happen. But it did, ever so slowly, she tipped over and kind of rolled clumsily onto her side, one hand still clutching her shoelace. I was several lanes away by that time, and didn't know what to do. Red-faced, I drove quickly away, alternating between hysterical laughter and complete chagrin.

I've felt bad about this for over a decade now. I have more or less stopped doing scary things to people, content with the occasional inhuman screech out of the side of my car. That woman, whoever she is, I hope she has forgiven me.

But I'll bet she doesn't wave at people anymore.

Labels: bipolar, forgiveness, laughter, mean, prank, regret, repression