Albertson's

My family and I are currently on holiday. My grandparents, aunt and uncle, cousin, and I have all gone to Ashland, Oregon, for the Shakespeare festival. We didn't go to see a Shakespeare play; we actually went to see a play adaptation of A Wrinkle in Time (which is my favorite book and which was adapted so brilliantly). In addition to seeing the play, we've gone around the town and to places in towns nearby. It's been nice. We've done fun things, the sort of things that don't happen at home.

But today, we did something that we don't normally do on holidays.

We went to Albertson's.

Now, this normally doesn't happen to me when I'm on holiday. Going to Albertson's, I mean. We don't normally find ourselves needing to get anything at the grocery store. But we needed one of those giant packages of bottled water, so we went to Albertson's to get it.

When we walked in, I just had to stand at the front of the store and process my situation. For reference - we had just come from the site of a Shakespeare festival, which had been preceded by a scenic drive through some farmland, which itself had been preceded by walking around a small town with old buildings and beautiful architecture and antique shops and suchlike. You know. Cool stuff. The sort of stuff you go on holiday for.

And here we were. At the most mundane place I can possibly think of.

Albertson's.

I wasn't disappointed. Truth be told, I was actually pretty entertained by the whole situation. I have a tendency to notice ironies and strange juxtapositions and...well, that's what the whole thing felt like. Stuff like this is what my life is all about. And I don't mean like it's the meaning of my life or what my goal in life is. I mean it's what the gist of my life's events are like. Basically, my life consists of me getting myself into things that are mostly mundane but have some sort of unusual quality that makes them amusing and a little bit surreal, and I just roll with it and have a good time while I'm at it.

I occupied myself by wandering off from the rest of the group to look at laundry detergent and window spray and stare at it and examine it like it was the most fascinating, amazing stuff ever. I was hoping that someone might come by and think, "Who is this person and why are they so fascinated by the laundry detergent and window spray?" I like making other people's lives a little more surreal. 

The others bought water bottles and some things that weren't water bottles. My aunt took a curiously long time ordering a Starbucks. My grandma suggested we get frozen dinners and my uncle suggested we not because this is our vacation and we eat frozen dinners at home all the time, vacation is the time to do things you don't normally do. He ended up ordering us pizza when we got back to our hotel.

I'm sitting here thinking about the fact that, of all the memories I'm going to have of this trip, the fact that we went to an Albertson's is one of them. I'm more than okay with that.