Cart, horse

Charlie and I are entering a large midwestern discount store.  (I will not name the chain, but you may feel free to infer.  One of their best features is the — oh, what do you call them?  Those electric horses, the ones that accept a coin in exchange for a thrilling gallop across an endless grassy plain?  I don't know, the Wondrous Mechanical Horse-O-Mat?  Anyway, they have those, and they cost a penny.)

Charlie's looking forward to the horses.  "What is dis one's name?" he'll ask.  It is important for him to know before the ride begins so he can forge the special rapport with his mount any true horseman demands.  Lightning he repeats easily.  Trigger becomes Tigger, which entertains me mightily.  And Bucephalus fucks him right up.

But first he is gobsmacked by the carts.  When Charlie and I go to the grocery store together, the rule is this: If there's a truck waiting — the molded plastic love child of a shopping cart and a scaled-down semi, with all the inherited agility you'd expect — he's allowed to ride in it.  (If there is not one waiting, he is allowed to sob piteously until precisely halfway through canned goods, whine quietly until we hit the dairy aisle, and sniffle reproachfully until we're back in the car, where I am allowed to turn the radio up loud enough not to hear him.)

As we walk into this store today, we see a brightly colored truck cart at the same time — I'm holding his hand, and I can feel it clench in a spasm of excitement.  There are several of them waiting.  "Go on," I tell him.  "We can have one."

I am not two steps farther towards the fleet of mini juggernauts when a store employee stops me and says, "Those are a dollar."

"What?" I ask, sure that I must have misheard.  Why, perhaps she meant that the store would pay me a dollar to thank me for the now-prolonged time I would spend in their store while my son happily turned the truck's plastic steering wheel, beeped its feeble horn, and flirted recklessly with decapitation by poking his head out of the side of the truck, leaning out to grin at me as I happened to be entering the Axe/Sickle/Machete aisle.

But no.  She meant that the store charged a dollar to use the carts.  I sputter a little, surprised and appalled.  She was quick to offer reassurance: "But it has TV in it."

For the not inconsiderable sum of a dollar —People!  The horses cost a penny! — I could push my child around the store, released from his storebound cares by an hour-long rolling Wiggles concert.  (If I were smart, I would first roll the tour bus through the Zippo/Bic aisle so Charlie would be properly equipped to raise his lighter during the power ballad.)

And I'm about to get all, you know, judgey like I do and indignantly tell the store employee that I would sooner set a dollar bill on fire — Charlie, if you're not using it, hand me your lighter, please — when a woman about my age returns a cart at the end of her shopping trip, her happy six-year-old tumbling out. 

But because I'm still appalled, and moreover quite inflexible, I tell Charlie no, that I'd made a mistake, that he could not ride in a truck, that his mother is a cold-hearted monster who torments little kids for fun, but that the blame for his predicament really rests with the people who run this store, who are, I assure him, bastard people.  And he cries, loud and inconsolable, until we're well past the Expensive Toys/Trachea-Sized Hard Candy/Interesting Things That Are Sharp or Hot or Fragile That Your Mother Will Not Let You Have, That Charlie-Thwarting Bitch aisle.

So at the front of the store once more, as we watch another cheerful kid clamber out of his own personal mobile disco, I think, Well, perhaps I should never say never. 

I mean, you never know, right?  Maybe they make one with the Roches.

Posted by Julie at 10:06:23 AM in Charles in charge

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Cart, horse

Charlie and I are entering a large midwestern discount store.  (I will not name the chain, but you may feel free to infer.  One of their best features is the — oh, what do you call them?  Those electric horses, the ones that accept a coin in exchange for a thrilling gallop across an endless grassy plain?  I don't know, the Wondrous Mechanical Horse-O-Mat?  Anyway, they have those, and they cost a penny.)

Charlie's looking forward to the horses.  "What is dis one's name?" he'll ask.  It is important for him to know before the ride begins so he can forge the special rapport with his mount any true horseman demands.  Lightning he repeats easily.  Trigger becomes Tigger, which entertains me mightily.  And Bucephalus fucks him right up.

But first he is gobsmacked by the carts.  When Charlie and I go to the grocery store together, the rule is this: If there's a truck waiting — the molded plastic love child of a shopping cart and a scaled-down semi, with all the inherited agility you'd expect — he's allowed to ride in it.  (If there is not one waiting, he is allowed to sob piteously until precisely halfway through canned goods, whine quietly until we hit the dairy aisle, and sniffle reproachfully until we're back in the car, where I am allowed to turn the radio up loud enough not to hear him.)

As we walk into this store today, we see a brightly colored truck cart at the same time — I'm holding his hand, and I can feel it clench in a spasm of excitement.  There are several of them waiting.  "Go on," I tell him.  "We can have one."

I am not two steps farther towards the fleet of mini juggernauts when a store employee stops me and says, "Those are a dollar."

"What?" I ask, sure that I must have misheard.  Why, perhaps she meant that the store would pay me a dollar to thank me for the now-prolonged time I would spend in their store while my son happily turned the truck's plastic steering wheel, beeped its feeble horn, and flirted recklessly with decapitation by poking his head out of the side of the truck, leaning out to grin at me as I happened to be entering the Axe/Sickle/Machete aisle.

But no.  She meant that the store charged a dollar to use the carts.  I sputter a little, surprised and appalled.  She was quick to offer reassurance: "But it has TV in it."

For the not inconsiderable sum of a dollar —People!  The horses cost a penny! — I could push my child around the store, released from his storebound cares by an hour-long rolling Wiggles concert.  (If I were smart, I would first roll the tour bus through the Zippo/Bic aisle so Charlie would be properly equipped to raise his lighter during the power ballad.)

And I'm about to get all, you know, judgey like I do and indignantly tell the store employee that I would sooner set a dollar bill on fire — Charlie, if you're not using it, hand me your lighter, please — when a woman about my age returns a cart at the end of her shopping trip, her happy six-year-old tumbling out. 

But because I'm still appalled, and moreover quite inflexible, I tell Charlie no, that I'd made a mistake, that he could not ride in a truck, that his mother is a cold-hearted monster who torments little kids for fun, but that the blame for his predicament really rests with the people who run this store, who are, I assure him, bastard people.  And he cries, loud and inconsolable, until we're well past the Expensive Toys/Trachea-Sized Hard Candy/Interesting Things That Are Sharp or Hot or Fragile That Your Mother Will Not Let You Have, That Charlie-Thwarting Bitch aisle.

So at the front of the store once more, as we watch another cheerful kid clamber out of his own personal mobile disco, I think, Well, perhaps I should never say never. 

I mean, you never know, right?  Maybe they make one with the Roches.