NOW you tell me?

I woke up Saturday morning with the intention of weeding the three small flower/weed beds on my patio. When I saw how many weeds there were, I decided it would be easier to drive across town to Lowes, buy several bags of pine bark, load the bags into my trunk, drive all the way home, unload the bags and spread them into the flower/weed beds than to pull all those weeds.

When I got to Lowes, I wandered around a while until I found what I wanted because I hate pushing those huge-ass flatbed carts around while I'm shopping. They're hard to handle and I feel like everybody's looking at me. After I decided on which pine bark, landscaping stones and trellises I wanted, I found one of those aforementioned huge-ass flatbed carts and began pushing it to the back of the garden area where they keep the big bags of landscaping materials.

I pushed the cart about one foot and immediately wanted to bolt from the store. This had to be the noisiest cart in the history of carts. Everybody in the garden area turned to look at me. I had no choice but to hold my head up and press on. The more I pushed the louder the cart became. It didn't help that I had to walk the length of a football field with my bellowing cart to get to the back of the store. Even little old ladies and children were giving me dirty looks.

When I reached the back of the garden center, I loaded the damn cart with four sacks of pine bark, three sacks of marble chips and one trellis. I thought these might stabilize the cart and make it less noisy. While the cart was a little less noisy, it was now almost impossible for me to push.

Even with my freakishly strong upper body strength, I had to push the still noisy cart with my whole body leaning forward at a forty-five degree angle digging in with my legs like a linebacker. I finally made it to the checkout area and paid for my stuff. However, when I tried to push the cart out to the parking lot, it got caught on a tiny dip in the concrete.

The cashier looked at my cart and said, "Oh, you got that broken cart. We've been trying to get rid of that thing."

"Yeah," added the other cashier, "I thought they put it in the back."

"The front wheels are broken," said the Lowe's guy who helped me get the broken cart over the dip in the concrete. "See, the right wheel doesn't turn and neither of them have any rubber on them."

"Well, slap my ass and call me biscuit. That's a little bit of information I could have used about an hour ago," I said.

I didn't really say that.

I wish I had said that.

But, I didn't.

I didn't say anything that I really, really, desperately, really wanted to say. There were too many little old ladies and children around.