MonkeyPants

Hilarity at London Drugs

So my dad and I were just at London Drugs. He wanted to find a cable so that I could plug my foundling digital camera into my laptop, because he showed me how to put my pictures on the computer (upload?) and then onto a CD. I wanted to get toilet paper because he was driving me home, and TP is one of those things that’s easier to drive home than bus home. I had a 24-pack (On sale!) under one arm.

LD didn’t have the cable. So it’s me, Dad, and 24 pillowy soft rolls.
He stops so suddenly that I bean him with the 24 PSRs.
“Is that Pam McAllister?” he asks.
I look. “And Wendy.”

He does a nifty U-turn. I retreat as well, but there are no open checkouts between us and freedom. Now what are we going to do?

It’s not that Pam and Wendy are bad people, they’re not. They just talk. A lot. Endlessly, ceaselessly. They’re really fountains of gossip and can tell you about the girl you went to grade six with for three months, and that she’s supposedly found a new man after all that unpleasantness in the Colombian jail, but don’t ask, because she surely mustn’t have done that, because really, her mom made such nice lemon squares that time at the Parent Social Night, and really, speaking of that did you hear? Marty (you remember, he was Valedictorian?) He got a sex change and is living as a woman! he has a place in Yaletown, which is really expensive, isn’t it? And of course his partner Jennifer, well, they have a daughter who goes to playgroup with Janet’s youngest, who is doing fine and the problems she was having with the bloodwork and all worked out very well, and of course, you know, Wendy’s design career has simply taken off, she’s so busy all the time and she doesn’t know but she might take a course, the same one that Calvin took that one time when he was trying to upgrade, of course such a shame about his horse, he really loved it and had Wendy do a painting of it, and Stuart decided he needed a copy, but Calvin didn’t want to give it to him, so they fought and it was simply, simply awful!

I can’t work out how they know any of this, since it is not humanly possible to get a sentence in edgewise. I’m serious. I have tried every time I’ve seen them for, oh, 25 years. Not once have I been successful.

So what are we going to do? Dad has a plan.
“I’ll see you outside,” he says, and as smoothly as James Bond evading the KGB, or even a passel of pissed off North Koreans, he’s gone.
Damn.

I need to make a fast decision. Do I get my sale PSRs, and endure twenty minutes of one-sided conversation or do I forego said sale PSRs and retreat into the perfumed night?

No contest. Sorry, PSRs. I hoist them up on the stacks of bottled water beside me and, not as smoothly as James Bond, but with a pretty good speed and smoothness, catch up with my dad.

We run away giggling. Like idiots.

Cool.