Blazing Trails

A couple of days ago while I was searching the shelf of a grocery store for my favorite brand of peanut butter, a man stopped to tell me about the issues he was having with his prescriptions at the store’s pharmacy. I don’t know what prompted this. He was probably in his seventies and wasn’t unkempt but definitely fit into the geezer category and his short white beard made him look grizzled. He said he was going to move his prescriptions to the Walgreen’s down the street. I nodded with what I thought would be interpreted as commiseration and moved on. In the next aisle, another very similar man stopped me. He waved a jar of Miracle Whip toward me and said, “I use this instead of milk.” It was the first I’d heard of Miracle Whip being used like that and I was dumbstruck. I asked if he didn’t thin it with something. Turns out he meant he uses it to coat fish before cooking and I’m not sure why he chose to bring that up, other than he was wearing a cap with a logo from a television fishing show. I thanked him for the information. When I got home, I told my husband the level I’d sunk to, that only grizzled geezers with white beards and tank tops hit on me. He reminded me that though he doesn’t wear tank tops, his own beard has gotten fairly white and he’d hit on me any time. My mother-in-law was fond of collecting ketchup packs and little cellophane cracker packets from restaurants. She always carried a full assortment in her purse. My sister told her if she wanted to attract old men she should crush some of those crackers and leave a Hansel-and-Gretel type trail, that it never failed. A less messy and more effective way may be just walking around the aisles of a grocery store.

Photo courtesy stevepb at Pixabay.com