Old Ned's Blog

Terror Stalked Me in The Stater Bros Parking Lot

I was not sure how to title this.  I am not even sure I can explain it.  I have had real fear fall upon me several times in my life. This is something I wrote a few years ago while living in Palm Desert, CA

The first time fear fell on me, I was at my wedding reception many years ago, having just married my wife. She hails from Clay County, Kentucky. Several of her uncles, dressed in their finest bib overalls took me aside and in between swigs out of a large brown jug, told me that they didn’t have divorces in their family, just hunting accidents.  I laughed. They didn’t.

The other time was when I was run over by a metro bus and learned firsthand about the law of the impenetrability of matter. That describes the law that states two or more bodies of matter cannot occupy the same space simultaneously. I discovered that in cases where two bodies of matter do try to occupy the same space, the softer body always loses. That cost me my right lung and a month in a coma. I did live, however.

Well, back to my trip to Stater Brothers, the new store at the corner of Varner and Washington.  I should have known better than to have parked halfway up one of the parking rows in front of the store.   I usually avoid such places; especially in areas where half the drivers are my age and half don’t have licenses or insurance and the other half are young, aggressive drivers who are trying to avoid the other two halves.

After picking up a few things we needed and several we didn’t, I pushed my cart out and worked my way through the cars and traffic to my car and unloaded my groceries. Just as I opened my car door, I heard a crash and a scream and saw that a woman had pushed her cart behind the car of an elderly gentleman about my age as he was backing out of his stall. Her cart flipped, the groceries flew out and she was screaming at him for not knowing she was going to ignore his moving vehicle and step right behind his moving vehicle.

A car coming down the lane stopped about one parking spot before my own and waited for the mess to clear. The driver in the stall just above me backed out into the waiting car and those two fellows began a lively discussion at the back of my car.

The driver next me was convinced that the fellow waiting for the mess below us to clear had purposely driven into the back of his car sideways. Fear hit me like a ton of bricks. I was afraid to even get into my car by now but equally frightened that one of them was going to point at me as the culprit.

As I watched the two scenes unfold before me, a guy in a pickup truck with tires taller than me backed out of a stall about three or four stalls below the shopping cart explosion and as he tried to maneuver that behemoth of a vehicle out of the stall and facing down the lanel a lady whipped into the lane from below and stopped a foot from his driver’s side door and laid on the horn. 

Another lady pulled into the lane right behind her and pulled up bumper to bumper so even if the first lady wanted to back up a bit, she couldn’t do it. Both ladies now gave their horns a workout and while I am not sure about it, I think the driver of the truck was now sitting in the truck bed, popping open a beer.

By now two more cars were sideways in the lane above the one that moved sideways to hit the car next to me and these gents were going to take a while in settling that issue.

It was going to be a long night. I called my wife and told her I was going to be late for dinner and ambled slowly down the mall to the coffee shop and ordered a nice hot double latte’ and picked up a copy of USA Today. That was when a firetruck, two medic units, and three police cars pulled into the parking lot.

It was going to be a long while waiting and all my happy pills were at home.