Coming Unmoored

I have to wonder whether it’s a bad sign or simply common sense to start hyperventilating in Lowe’s…

Charlie is in town for the weekend. After a lazy Saturday morning breakfast yesterday at Bobo’s, our favorite Tucson greasy spoon, I dragged him with me into Lowe’s. This was not terribly difficult in that Charlie has a Y chromosome and, as best as I can determine, Lowe’s is the Toys-R-Us for red-blooded American males over the age of about 25.

Having spent too many Sunday afternoons of my childhood inside a hardware store with my father, my general mode of operation inside any kind of home-improvement store is to get in, zero in on my target, and get out as quickly as possible like any good, high-powered, military retrieval operation or guy having to enter Victoria’s Secret for a birthday gift for his girlfriend.

My objective yesterday was to pick up a dolly to help with moving things into the floating home. (Even with floating things in, there’s going to be a lot of schlepping of boxes.) But, between all the upcoming remodeling projects I have and the ones Charlie has going on at his place in New Mexico, we ended up looking at: paint swatches, appliances, closet organizers, wood floors, bathrooms, and doors & windows.

Somewhere about the time of hitting the French door section, I hit overload. The enormity of everything I’m going to need to do eventually do with my little place hit me, and I started to hyperventilate.

I have to wonder if Lowe’s offers their employees training in how to handle panic attacks, because the very nice young man with asthma who’d been assigned to Garden in spite of his allergies calmly assessed the situation and offered me a hit off his inhaler.

After a couple of minutes I pulled things together, grabbed my dolly and Charlie, and got the heck out of the store. I then proceeded to spend the rest of my afternoon pretending that I’d bought a very new, fully-furnished condo with easy move-in access from the street. Hey, a girl can dream, right?

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