I'm trudging around the perimeter of the parking lot, hungry, wet, and tired of shopping; I'd really like to drive somewhere warm and dry and eat a hot bowl of soup, but I'm not going anywhere if I don't find my car, and so on I trudge, avoiding the puddles as much as possible, occasionally stopping to scan the parking lot that looks more unfamiliar the farther I go, until I'm so desperate the I briefly consider admitting to some kind stranger that I can't find my car.
Once I was the kind stranger helping a frail white-haired woman find her car in a hospital parking lot--she had come out the wrong door and feared that she couldn't manage the long walk around to the other side, so I gave her a ride, all the while wondering whether someone so helpless could be trusted behind the wheel. And now here I was, imagining the conversation:
Excuse me, can you help me find my car? I've lost it.
Oh, you poor dear--of course I'll help. What kind of car is it?
A Toyota Camry.
I scan the parking lot, a sea of Camrys. No help there. My feet hurt. My stomach is growling. I can't manage another trip around the parking lot in these wet sandals--and oddly enough, it was shoes that brought me here.
I'd been shopping at a huge mall on the north side of Columbus, hoping to fill some gaps in my teaching wardrobe, and I'd made some great finds: a marvelous pair of dress pants, a black go-with-anything sweater, a lightweight blue blouse so lovely I'd bought it without looking at the price tag. But I couldn't find teaching shoes, a perennial problem. One pair of good teaching shoes had declined so much that I've been wearing them when I mow the lawn, and while a good pair of teaching shoes can eventually be transformed into mowing shoes, the transformation does not work the other way.
Shoe-shopping is always a problem. I could go into any large shoe store and say "Bring me everything you have in a 10 wide," and then I'd wait for twenty minutes or more until the sales clerk came out with exactly two boxes, one containing leopard-print stilettos and the other lime-green go-go boots. Apparently shoe manufacturers believe that only drag queens wear size 10 wide.
So after finishing up at my favorite Columbus mall, I searched on my phone for more shoe stores and was delighted to find several located at an outlet mall just ten miles up the interstate. I'd never been there before, but it didn't seem too hard to find.
Then the rain started--the kind of rain that inspires drivers on the interstate to turn on their emergency flashers and slow way down. Visibility declined as water pooled on the interstate, and within a few miles I was so tensed up that my knees were aching and my jaw wanted to explode. I didn't realize how long I'd been holding my breath until I stopped in the parking lot and let it out.
Still raining--pouring, in fact. I checked the radar to see if I ought to wait it out but no, I didn't want to spend the next hour watching raindrops in an outlet mall parking lot, especially at lunchtime. So I grabbed my umbrella and made a dash to the mall entrance, trying to avoid the deeper puddles, which distracted me from paying attention to where I'd parked.
And after all that effort the outlet mall was a bust: lots of shoe stores but nothing that worked for me, and do you know how annoying it is to try on shoes with wet feet? Nowhere to eat except Subway, which I loathe, and so I finally decided to get out of there and move on.
But the mall was disorienting and I came out a different way, and soon I found myself squelching around the perimeter in soaking-wet shoes, fearful that I'd become that frail, helpless old woman who probably can't be trusted behind the wheel. A guy dressed like a security guard went zipping past in a golf cart and I thought about flagging him down, but I couldn't work up the courage. Okay, I'm going around one more corner and if I don't see my car, I'm just going to curl up beside a bush and die of shame--but then I see the pond, and I remember: I parked facing the water, and it's not a very big pond, so if I keep going this direction a little farther--
And there it is. I've never been happier to see my car. The only thing that could have improved the experience would be if I'd been carrying a new pair of shoes and some lunch, but instead I'm carrying the vision of that helpless woman walking in hopeless circles but unwilling to ask for help.
But that's too much weight to carry around, so I shoved her out the door and left her standing in a puddle in the middle of the parking lot.
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