The Garden of the Blind

After a couple of days of nudging, this evening I went to Wal-Mart with my wife. I’m not entirely sure what she wanted to go for, or what other motives she could have had in the trip, but hey, no skin off my back.

I’ve observed before how the culture at that store can be somewhat lacking. I’ve felt out of place for wearing a (t)shirt that had sleeves, but today I was wearing a jacket, and so was everyone else. It wasn’t until we were in the checkout line that I started getting that Ozark feeling. Next to our line was their entire Yu-gi-oh collection (which reminded me of how out of touch I’ve been with those kinds of games, even when I used to hang out with Magic players), and at one point a pair of brothers came to check them out. I noticed that the first one had bare feet, and brown dirt stains around his ankles. The second one didn’t have bare feet. Instead he had dirty, ill-fitting socks. I swore then and there that I would not take my children to major department stores during the winter without some semi-rigid soled footware.