JessieCarter's Blog

Clean Up on Aisle 9

17 May 2010 3 Comments

by jessiecarter in GRAVITY Experiment Tags: buggie, hairstyle, Illinois, kindergarten, Laura Ingalls, mother, naked cartwheels, Sam's, shopping cart, Waterloo, Wizard, yellow brick road

GRAVITY Experiment Day #34

Pounds lost / pounds to go:  3.5 / 11.5

Exercise:  I’ll double up tomorrow.  Okay, I did demo a bunch of exercises to patients today but I hardly got my heart rate up.  My blood pressure was 98/55 and resting heart rate was 62 bpm yesterday at Sam’s which are both improvements for me so this exercise thing is doing something;-)

I’ve done some stupid stuff in my day.  Beyond naked cartwheels, I have a few events in my past that I’ll never forget.  These events shape who we are and give rise to our quirks and nervous habits as adults.

Case in point – shopping carts.  I have a phobia of “buggies” (that’s what they call them in the South).  So you have kids and suddenly the shopping cart becomes your worst enemy.  I’ll never forget looking away from our first kiddo for a second and turning around to find her swabbing her mouth across the cart handle like a harmonica.  That was before all those fancy covers they have now.  The kid hasn’t missed a day of school in years so I think every child should lick a buggie for immunity’s sake (not really but it’s another step closer to that Mother-of-the-Year award).

My fear of all things buggie started when I was in kindergarten.  I was always a huge “help” to my Mom when she went to the booming metropolis of Waterloo, Illinois, to do the grocery shopping.  I liked to go because there was a checker-patterned tile floor around the periphery of the store that was fun to follow like the yellow brick road.  Then there were those cool carts.  This particular store had the high, shallow carts where there was enough room for a child to sit under the basket.

That was my favorite spot when I got tired from skipping around to see the Wizard.  One day I must have been super tired because I laid down under the cart.  Usually I had my waist-long hair up in Laura Ingalls braids but not this particular day.  I let out a yelp as Mom kept rolling along while my blond locks got wound tightly around the cart’s wheels and pinned my head against the metal.

Clean up on Aisle 9 was right.  They had to invert the cart and stand me up as they attempted to unwind my mangled mane.  Mom was the picture of calmness – much better than I would have been with one of mine currently;-)  That was the end of my free rides.  My long hair ended shortly thereafter.

From that day on, I’ve thought shopping carts were from the devil.  Good grief – they run over toes, they dent cars, and they contaminate innocent children.

I also learned one of my best coping strategies in that moment – when life has you wound up and pinned, change your hairstyle.