MOST THINGS CONSIDERED
By:Minx McCloud
There I was this past Sunday, wending my way through the grocery store, along with everyone else in my town. I mean everybody. There was not a shopping cart to be found. Folks were unloading the contents of their carts into their trunks as other people yanked the carts out from under them.
One elderly woman had quite a tug-of-war with a teen-age girl with green hair and a nose ring, but just as I thought the old lady would bean the kid, Nose Ring backed down.
| I’m sure that at least one male will e-mail me to tell me that this is the first time in 40 years that two teams have tied for first place during a partial lunar eclipse, or that there’s a configuration of the stars that signals an unprecedented winning streak. Or something. |
"OK, grandma, we’ll put our groceries in the same cart," she said crossly. "Just don’t tell Mom we were arguing."
It was a dog-eat-dog day.
After I got in the store, I found out what had happened. Apparently there were back-to-back football games being televised, beginning at 4 p.m., and everyone wanted to get their shopping done. The women wanted their husbands to shop with them; the men wanted to get home by kickoff. They also wanted to stock up on snacks.
Although I understand the game of football (and have even been known to get carried away and cheer during the Super Bowl), I fail to understand how there can be such a crucial game two weeks into the season.
I’m sure that at least one male will e-mail me to tell me that this is the first time in 40 years that two teams have tied for first place during a partial lunar eclipse, or that there’s a configuration of the stars that signals an unprecedented winning streak. Or something.
I think the Apocalypse may be involved. A guy at the deli counter tried to explain it to me, but when he started quoting from Revelation 6:8 and comparing Death on a pale horse to one of the linebackers in the Giants-Redskins game, I decided I didn’t really need smoked turkey breast and beat a hasty retreat.
There were a lot of men in the store, and I found that unusual, because here it was, a Sunday afternoon, and the games had begun at 1 p.m.
"How’d you get your husband to go shopping with you?" I asked one woman.
Her husband overheard me.
"The first two games stink," he said bluntly, eyeing me as if I were somehow responsible.
One fellow piled chips, Cheese Doodles, sour cream, cheese dip and salsa into his cart while his exasperated wife rolled her eyes. He threw two pepperonis in for good measure.
"What are you doing?" she said in exasperation. "You’re going to be watching the game alone. You don’t need all that. What about your cholesterol?"
"It’s eight hours of football," he said, grabbing some hot wings from the cold case. "I gotta eat, don’t I?"
I looked at his ample paunch and decided that no, he really didn’t need to eat at all. I’m a good judge of stuff like that, being really large myself. I console myself with the fact that if I ever end up on the show "Survivor," I won’t have to resort to eating rats. I’ll live off my natural body fat and outlast them all, even the guy who caught the fish.
The woman saw my sympathetic smile.
"Eight hours, baloney!" she said, sotto voce. "He’d better be planning to watch it on the 6-inch TV in the kitchen because at 7 o’clock, the kids and I are watching ‘Space Jam.’"
And you thought those fireworks Sunday night were from the Somerset Ballpark, didn’t you?
I told my own husband that just as watching sitcoms is my guilty pleasure, he deserves one too. But mine is less boring than his. How many times can 11 guys jump on the fellow with the ball before it gets old? Every game has the same outcome, but Ross and Rachel can approach the altar seven times and it always turns out differently.
And has anyone thought of broadcasting a game with just the action, the roars of the crowd and whatever comes over the loudspeaker at the game? That would make it much more real.
We’d get all the excitement, the drama, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat. And we wouldn’t have to put up with long-winded commentators like John Madden blathering endlessly about the Fuji blimp, the weather, or the number of pigeons perched in the eaves of the arena.
One day, Madden and another commentator were talking about everything but the game, when Madden said, "Say, who called that time-out anyway?"
"I don’t know," his partner replied.
Maybe if they hadn’t been fixated on a stacked blonde with "Go Giants" written on her chest, they might have seen what was happening down on the field.
But they rose to the occasion admirably.
When in doubt, cut to a commercial.
Minx McCloud is a free-lance journalist who writes about life in New Jersey. She can be reached at [email protected].