I Blow Up the Grocery Store

I've got to come up with something to blog about. That was my thought just before the whipped cream blew up. My thought after the cream bomb detonated was, the Thanksgiving curse nailed me again, only this time it lulled me into a false sense of security and then pounced a week later. Well played, Thanksgiving curse, you magnificent bastard.
Anyway. I was doing the weekly grocery shopping, and badly...I made the classic mistake of shopping when I skipped breakfast. It's hilarious to me that when I buy food while my stomach's growling, even the weirdest yuckiest nastiest food looks delicious.
Oooh, quince paste! I'd better get a couple of those. And a loaf of rye, even though I absolutely detest rye and would sooner stick a fork in my ear then use it (the bread, not the fork) for a sandwich. (Maybe two loaves!) Pink Himalayan sea salt? Sure, I've got about nine salt shakers in the house (we tend to misplace the salt a lot, for some reason) but none of them have Pink Himalayan salt in them. How could I have gotten so far in life without buying Pink Himalayan salt? Into the cart you go, salt. I am your new Mommy. What's this? Liverwurst is on sale? What a relief: I love buying lunch meat made from the organ that makes bile and breaks down all the really gross stuff in blood. And speaking of blood, how lucky am I that they're having a buy one pound of blood sausage, get five pounds free? Yummmmm! And coffee is on sale! My husband and I don't drink coffee, we don't even have a coffee maker, but I'd better buy at least five pounds of the vile beans. Oh, and I should probably get milk and eggs, and something for supper...eh, there's plenty of time for that once I select the perfect lychee. Whatever the hell that is.
My shopping finished, I trotted over to the checkout lane with a cart groaning beneath the weight of nine organically grown spaghetti squash. I'd gotten milk, too, and a few things I actually liked eating. Plus, several cans of whipped cream. I'd never dare show my face at home without whipped cream.
See, we're big fans of hot drinks at my house...my family loved tea long before it became the new pomegranate/acai/goji in terms of trendiness, as well as hot chocolate and cider. And my kids like to go all Starbucks-ey on their hot chocolate, which means gobs of whipped cream and sprinkles (we call it Flanders Cocoa, after the awesome hot chocolate Ned Flanders made for the Simpson kids). My walking to school uphill in the snow during a blizzard story is, "When I was a kid, we used water and powder to make cocoa. And the powder had...fake marshmallows. That's right. Powder! Fake! Water! I can't believe I lived through it, frankly..."
Which is why I had three big cans of whipped cream in my cart. And things would have turned out just fine if I hadn't been invested in being an antisocial asshat. I bring a book everywhere, which was buried in my purse which was buried beneath cans of whipped cream and quince paste. I could have left my purse where it was until the clerk had unearthed it, and risked having to actually talk to the gal ringing up my groceries, or I could have hauled it out of the cart, grabbed my book, and read until all my stuff was rung up. Guess which one I picked?
So: I yanked. My purse swung free. Two or three yogurts hit the floor, followed by a can of whipped cream, which blew up. There was a 'floomph!' and the world went white; for a few seconds, the checkout aisle was my own personal Vietnam. You know how in those action movies, the desperate hero will dive toward the bomb in slo-mo, shouting, "Nooooooo!" Yeah. Like that. Except with chilled dairy products instead of C-4.
And let me tell you: the whipped cream bomb had incredible range. I was drenched from my shins to my feet. The clerk in the aisle to my right got her back splattered. The entire battery rack behind me was also splattered: a four-foot display of batteries, liberally splashed top to bottom with whipped cream! All over the carpet, of course, and all over the case to my left which held cold pop and water bottles. It was EVERYWHERE.
To say I was mortified would be half-assing it. I wished I'd ONLY been mortified. I was so startled, and embarrassed, and freaked, that all I could do was stand in whipped cream and stammer. I looked like I'd been hiking through snow (yummy fattening snow with just the right amount of sugar mixed in) instead of the produce section. Dozens of people were staring. And--this is a rare and weird thing in my life--I had no idea what to say or do. At all. Standing frozen and horror-struck was the only thing I could think of, so I stuck with it.
To my great relief, the clerks thought it was hilarious. And not in a "jeez, did your mom have any kids that lived?" way, but in a "wow, that was so cool and weird!" way. It helped that they were all in their late teens/early twenties and thought a can of compressed dairy product spraying its load across not one, not two, but three aisles was pretty much the coolest thing to happen all morning...possibly all week. They even figured out what happened: the bottom of the can is thin, with an even thinner metal circle in the middle, and if it hits the floor just right, the metal dents and fffooommph! Wall to wall whipped cream, with a horrified (sticky) NYT best-selling author in the middle of the dairy tsunami.
Two of them started trying to blot the carpet (it was like being at a crime scene, frankly...I couldn't bear to watch their tentative dabbing with paper towels...oh, the humanity!), while another one sprinted to the dairy section and brought me a brand-new can of Redi-Whip. I was still pretty rattled, which explains my panicked response: "No, what are you doing? Don't point that thing at me, dammit! All of you: TAKE COVER! Get it away, get it AWAY." The supervisor came over, took one look, and started cracking up himself. I apologized about eight times in four seconds, only to be assured it was no big deal. In fact, they were more worried about me having cream all over my boots and pants than having it all over their display cases.
"Gee, d'you want me to...I mean, I could get you a bunch of wet paper towels..." She made a tentative swabbing motion toward my dripping boots.
"God, no. I'm putting all of you through enough. I deserve to walk around the rest of the day with whipped cream drying to a crack glaze from my toes to my shins. What? Oh. Paper, please."
Turns out the clerk doing most of the clean-up was...are you ready? Yeah: lactose intolerant. Which made her laugh even harder. I was all, jeez, maybe you shouldn't touch all that stuff with lactose in it...is it an eating thing, or a skin contact thing? Luckily, it was the former. But kind of hilarious that the one who pulled the short straw for "Clean-up on Aisle 8!" was someone with no experience of any kind with dairy products. "I didn't know whipped cream could do this," she marveled. "That's because you're prejudiced against all things dairy." "I am not! I'm intolerant. Big diff."
While all this was going on, they were courteously bagging my groceries, gently teasing me and each other, offering once more to help me clean my boots, asking if I needed anything else...the Byerly's Eagan store was wall-to-wall courtesy. And whipped cream.
And to think: I had told myself just that morning that there wasn't a thing to blog about. Well played, belated Thanksgiving curse. Well played. Oh, and Byerly's? You guys were just plain magnificent.