Saturday afternoon Jon and I took Leta to the grocery store to grab a couple items missing from our usual breakfast line-up: milk, orange juice, clove cigarettes. I usually do all the shopping during the week, but I thought I’d share the love and let Jon join in the Leta Shopping Experience, not that he hasn’t done his fair share lately. Last week he took her to Costco by himself and came home with four fingers missing.
I could have let Jon go by himself again on Saturday but he suffers from a compulsion that makes it impossible to walk past an object for sale without putting it in the shopping cart and buying it. Last week he bought four bottles of bulk-sized bleach at Costco. I asked him why, and when I explained, “But I have never used bleach in the laundry,” he said he was sure we’d find another use for all that bleach IT WAS ONLY A MATTER OF TIME. I tease him about this habit of his, going to the store and coming home with the most random shit, but secretly it’s one of the things I love most about him. That and his large, large shoe-size.
Toward the end of the outing Saturday we turned down the dairy aisle and were confronted with an upright cow hawking French cheese. It’s not that I’ve never seen a cow, or one standing upright for that matter. In fact, it was an upright cow that taught me my first lesson in “Object A goes into Object B.” It’s just that the boy wearing the costume was resigned to the fact that he had swollen udders the size of a newly implanted set of silicone tits jutting out from his gut. I had to hide my face in a wall of pickle jars to muffle my laughter.
“You can laugh,” he saw me and didn’t flinch. “It’s okay. I mean, I’m okay with this.”
“I’m sorry, I just can’t get over the size of those udders,” I told him, ribbing Jon the entire time to get a load of those udders.
“I volunteered for this,” he offered as a means to explain his resignation.
“You volunteered to do this,” I said back to him, nodding, because that seems like a logical way to spend a Saturday afternoon, volunteering to dress up like a cow to hand out free cheese to strange, religious white people.
“Well, the girl who was supposed to do this backed out at the last second.”
Jon let out a sigh, “Ahhhhhhhhh,” for his fellow brother.
“I admire you, Cow,” I assured him. “It obviously takes balls to wear udders.”
