Here's a new and unexpected problematic aspect of home-ownership...
What do you do when your house (without consulting you) takes on a shopping cart?
Ours arrived in the middle of the night. A nice blue number from Wal-Mart. It is clean and un-damaged and parked right outside our garage door. Sal and I discovered it this morning, and were at a loss as to what to do. I can tell you, now that I've had all day to think about it, that there is nothing in the home-owner's handbook that covers how to handle the sudden onset of a shopping cart.
We have no idea how it found our house. The nearest Wal-Mart is a good 7 miles from here at least. I'm not so naive that I don't understand that the cart was probably liberated by a homeless or unfortunate person who used it to ferry around their posessions. I get that. What I'm trying to understand is how that person pushed the aforementioned cart all the way up to our garage door and then said, "That's far enough. This will do nicely." And then what? Unloaded all their stuff, shouldered it and walked away? A cart liberated from a market parking lot is not outside my realm of understanding. It's a perfectly good cart abandoned in an urban, but fairly nice, neighborhood that I have yet to really grasp.
Anyway...
Sal and I were agreed that we wanted to avoid touching it. Or even really looking at it too long. Anything that might imply ownership of said cart to any watching neighbors. If it seems heartless to leave a poor shopping cart out in the cold like that, I should point out that a shopping cart is an unwieldy thing to take on. It's not the sort of thing that you can stick in a closet, and it's not the sort of thing you can drop in a waste basket. The trash guys do not, as a rule, collect shopping carts with the rest of the garbage. I'm fairly sure that the bulk pick-up guys (who come get beds and couches and old water coolers and stuff like that) don't deal in shopping carts either.
Did you ever unwrap something that was sealed in thin cellophane, and had a piece of the cellophane static itself to one of your fingers? You shake your fingers, but it just sticks. You grab it with your other had, but it statics on to that one. You stand there over the trash bin, shaking both your hands like a madman, but that damn piece of cellophane just clings. It's yours now, and there's no getting rid of it.
A shopping cart is exactly like that. Only bigger. And metal. With wheels.
So we don't want to touch it, or acknowledge it, or god forbid, take it into our home. We decided to leave it out there for a day and see if it decided to cling to any passers by.
The cart went untouched for most of the day, until 3 o'clock, when the area schools let out. Then it saw all kinds of action. Kids, for the most part, can't resist something like a shopping cart. It calls to them: "Hey kid, I have wheels. You really should give me a push. Maybe give your buddies a ride..." And push they did, the little bastards. from one end of my house to the other, but never once did the cart leave the perimeter of my house. The kids may have succumbed to the allure of the cart, but their parents were well-versed in the shopping cart's insideous clinging nature. "Put that back, jimmy... Leave that there..."
Damnit.
At some point tonight somebody went to the trouble to knock the cart over. Knocked it right on its side, but did not in any way drag it further from the house. Just up-ended it. See, the neighbors, they know. They look out their windows and see the cart, and they feel sorry for us, the way you would if you saw a man in the store with a tumor growing out of his head. "Look. Those poor people. They have a cart. and they seem so young too... Such a shame. Kids, when you go outside, do not touch that cart. In fact, cross to the other side of the street."
So we've left it out there, like a shiny metal spider web, hoping that a passing fly may inadvertently pull it from our house, But Sal and I, in our hearts, know the truth:
The shopping cart is now grafted to us. Like it or not, this thing sits out there even as I type... Built for movement, but not going anywhere. It is as surely a part of my house as the front door, or the roof. It is only a matter of time before the garage door slides upwards, and I take this new thing into my home. It's either that or let it stay out there, the bulging tumor on my house's head, rusting in the fall, catching rain in the winter, season in, season out, until one day we put an ad in the paper. "Lovely Canton townhome, 3 BR, 1 1/2 Bath, Claw-foot tub, deck, shopping cart. Please call."
What do you do when your house (without consulting you) takes on a shopping cart?
Ours arrived in the middle of the night. A nice blue number from Wal-Mart. It is clean and un-damaged and parked right outside our garage door. Sal and I discovered it this morning, and were at a loss as to what to do. I can tell you, now that I've had all day to think about it, that there is nothing in the home-owner's handbook that covers how to handle the sudden onset of a shopping cart.
We have no idea how it found our house. The nearest Wal-Mart is a good 7 miles from here at least. I'm not so naive that I don't understand that the cart was probably liberated by a homeless or unfortunate person who used it to ferry around their posessions. I get that. What I'm trying to understand is how that person pushed the aforementioned cart all the way up to our garage door and then said, "That's far enough. This will do nicely." And then what? Unloaded all their stuff, shouldered it and walked away? A cart liberated from a market parking lot is not outside my realm of understanding. It's a perfectly good cart abandoned in an urban, but fairly nice, neighborhood that I have yet to really grasp.
Anyway...
Sal and I were agreed that we wanted to avoid touching it. Or even really looking at it too long. Anything that might imply ownership of said cart to any watching neighbors. If it seems heartless to leave a poor shopping cart out in the cold like that, I should point out that a shopping cart is an unwieldy thing to take on. It's not the sort of thing that you can stick in a closet, and it's not the sort of thing you can drop in a waste basket. The trash guys do not, as a rule, collect shopping carts with the rest of the garbage. I'm fairly sure that the bulk pick-up guys (who come get beds and couches and old water coolers and stuff like that) don't deal in shopping carts either.
Did you ever unwrap something that was sealed in thin cellophane, and had a piece of the cellophane static itself to one of your fingers? You shake your fingers, but it just sticks. You grab it with your other had, but it statics on to that one. You stand there over the trash bin, shaking both your hands like a madman, but that damn piece of cellophane just clings. It's yours now, and there's no getting rid of it.
A shopping cart is exactly like that. Only bigger. And metal. With wheels.
So we don't want to touch it, or acknowledge it, or god forbid, take it into our home. We decided to leave it out there for a day and see if it decided to cling to any passers by.
The cart went untouched for most of the day, until 3 o'clock, when the area schools let out. Then it saw all kinds of action. Kids, for the most part, can't resist something like a shopping cart. It calls to them: "Hey kid, I have wheels. You really should give me a push. Maybe give your buddies a ride..." And push they did, the little bastards. from one end of my house to the other, but never once did the cart leave the perimeter of my house. The kids may have succumbed to the allure of the cart, but their parents were well-versed in the shopping cart's insideous clinging nature. "Put that back, jimmy... Leave that there..."
Damnit.
At some point tonight somebody went to the trouble to knock the cart over. Knocked it right on its side, but did not in any way drag it further from the house. Just up-ended it. See, the neighbors, they know. They look out their windows and see the cart, and they feel sorry for us, the way you would if you saw a man in the store with a tumor growing out of his head. "Look. Those poor people. They have a cart. and they seem so young too... Such a shame. Kids, when you go outside, do not touch that cart. In fact, cross to the other side of the street."
So we've left it out there, like a shiny metal spider web, hoping that a passing fly may inadvertently pull it from our house, But Sal and I, in our hearts, know the truth:
The shopping cart is now grafted to us. Like it or not, this thing sits out there even as I type... Built for movement, but not going anywhere. It is as surely a part of my house as the front door, or the roof. It is only a matter of time before the garage door slides upwards, and I take this new thing into my home. It's either that or let it stay out there, the bulging tumor on my house's head, rusting in the fall, catching rain in the winter, season in, season out, until one day we put an ad in the paper. "Lovely Canton townhome, 3 BR, 1 1/2 Bath, Claw-foot tub, deck, shopping cart. Please call."
posted by CommonWombat at 11:06 PM
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