Everyone knows that the cardinal rule of grocery shopping is to get in the shortest checkout line. It is absolutely crucial to follow this rule when you’re grocery shopping with your baby, because babies have a tendency to be angelic throughout entire the entire shopping trip, then come unglued the second you get to the checkout and can’t hold them because you’ve got to unload your buggy, fish your wallet out of your purse, pay, and be otherwise incapacitated.

Unless, of course, a Walmart cashier claims your baby as her baby.Which is what happened to me–inevitably, I suppose given my relationship with Walmart.

Two weeks ago I was speeding toward the checkout lanes, eyes scanning each conveyor belt for the one with the fewest groceries. The shortest lanes–indeed, open and completely empty, as it was bright and early Monday  morning–were the 20 Items or Fewer registers (Yes–the signs actually say “20 Items or Less,” but that’s grammatically incorrect so I refuse to write it), but as I was doing a week’s worth of shopping, I passed them by without so much as a glance.

Until one of the express cashiers called out, “Hey, baby!” which stopped me in my tracks. Not because I thought I was getting hit on, but because the cashier, a middle-aged woman, was speaking literally– I’ve been stopped enough while grocery shopping to know when someone is talking to the Burt Squirt.

I paused in my pursuit of the shortest checkout line to indulge the friendly (and no doubt bored) cashier, pleased to see that I recognized her. Once upon a time, she told me the Burt Squirt was juicy. She’d checked me out lots of times since then–not surprising, since I do my grocery shopping every Monday around the same time, though she wasn’t normally in the express lanes, for which, as I mentioned, I had too many groceries. So, after we exchanged pleasantries (or rather, she flirted with the Burt Squirt: “Your mama didn’t see me, but you saw me, and you grinned, didn’t you, baby! Yes, you know me, big boy!”), I started to wheel my cart around in search of another register.

“Y’all come over here to me!” she said, and wouldn’t hear my protests about having a good deal more than twenty items. “I gotta talk to my baby, see what new with him!”

It was at this point that I realized, to my chagrin, that I’d never bothered to find out her name, even though it had been right there pinned to her blue polo shirt for me to read every time she’d rung up my groceries. Tempie–I could remember that, since the Dallas Classical radio station’s daytime announcer is named Tempie.

As Walmart Tempie rang us up, she kept up a running conversation with Liam, as well as with the customer behind me in line: “This my Monday baby! Look how he smile at me! Oh, he waving now–he know it time to go, mmm-hmm, he know it!”

Last Monday Tempie wasn’t working the self-checkouts, but was back at her usual lane–which happened to be the shortest, so I got in it. Before she’d even finished scanning all her current customer’s groceries, she’d spotted us farther back in line and was saying, “There’s my Monday baby! He smiling at me–he know his friend!”

His friend.

She wasn’t his cashier.

He wasn’t her customer.

Friends.

For the first time since I began making dreaded weekly grocery shopping trips, it occurred to me that more goes on in Walmart than just hurrying in, checking off all the items on my list, and hurrying back out again. (More, even, than having another funny encounter to add to my collection of vaguely amusing anecdotes.)

Today I broke the cardinal rule of grocery shopping. I didn’t get in the shortest checkout line. I looked for Tempie, and I got in her line, which was, in fact, the longest. But the smile that lit up her tired face when she saw the Burt Squirt was worth the wait–if, indeed, we did wait any extra time; I thought the rhythmic beep beep of the bar code scanner accelerated, as if Tempie was in a hurry to finish up with her other customer so she could talk to the Burt Squirt properly.

Or maybe she didn’t work any faster. Maybe I just realized there was no need to rush, that there are more unpleasant things I could have been doing this morning than listening to a grocery store cashier tell a total stranger how nice my–her–baby is who comes to see her every Monday.

Even if–especially if–it’s at Walmart.

Somebody at Albertsons realized that if a manufacturer is going to offer a coupon for $3.00 off the purchase of three products, selling that product for $1 apiece doesn’t turn a profit.

How do I know this?

Well…After I managed to snag nearly $60 worth of spices for $4 last Sunday, I might have gone back to Albertsons the following Friday and seen that the deal was still on and they had an Italian spice blend in this time and I still had a $3.00 off coupon and cleaned them out again without once swiping my credit card.

And, addicted to amused by hitting the jackpot not once, but twice, Mr. Burt and I might have driven to two other nearby Albertsons (because there was a cinnamon sugar blend we hadn’t managed to score yet), only to discover that there are other shoppers like us in town but no other Albertsons employees who like to watch customers treat the self-checkout like a slot machine; the other Carrollton store had sold clean out of the bargain spice grinders, and while the Lewisville location had plenty in stock, they’d rigged the self-checkouts to discourage the kind of extreme couponing required to pull off this deal.

And I might have made a third trip to my neighborhood Albertsons yesterday (not for free spices, I swear!) and discovered that they had followed suit.

It was a buzz kill sad day for frugality, but I take heart in the knowledge that I got $133.92 worth of spices for the low low price of $4.

Pepper, anyone?

You know when you go to the store for two or three specific items and you come out with considerably more than what’s on your list? That happened to Mr. Burt and me today. Only usually when that happens, you also come out with considerably less money than you expected. Which is not what happened to Mr. Burt and me when we went to Albertsons this evening for onion powder, turmeric, paprika, and ground coriander, and came out with an additional twenty-one jars of spices.

Yes, you read that correctly: twenty-one jars of spices.

It all started when the only ground coriander we could find cost a whopping $6.29. As we had whole coriander in our spice rack at home, which has never been used in the six and a half years since we were given said spice rack for our wedding, it seemed like the thing to do was to buy a pepper mill and grind our own coriander. (Probably it should have seemed like the thing to do was to throw out six and a half year-old coriander, but this is a couple of cheapskates with compulsive hoarding tendencies we’re talking about.)

Problem being, there were no pepperless mills for sale.

But this wasn’t much of a problem, after all, as Albertsons was running a special on McCormick peppercorn and sea salt grinders. For the low low price of $1 (regularly $2.79), we could empty the black peppercorn from the grinder and fill it with our rancid old coriander.

We grabbed two, though looking back, we couldn’t tell you why we grabbed two. It was just lucky that we did, as, at the end of our transaction, the coupon printer presented us with a coupon for $1.50 off the purchase of two McCormick spices.

“Does that mean,” Mr. Burt said, “that we could buy two more of those black peppercorn grinders for fifty cents?”

I reasoned that it wouldn’t hurt to see, since we regularly cook with fresh ground pepper, so Mr. Burt ran back to the spice aisle for two more. Sure enough, after our coupon, they rang up for fifty cents.

And we got another of those buy two, get $1.50 off coupons.

Only this time I read the fine print, which stated that there was also the option of buying three McCormick spices and getting a $3.00 off coupon.

Mr. Burt’s eyes locked with mine.

He raced back to the spice aisle and got six more. We paid $1.50 for the first three spice jars and got a coupon to apply to the next three. Which came up free, not even requiring us to swipe a credit card, and still printed off a $3.00 off coupon.

“What the heck?” Mr. Burt cried through his hysterical laughter. “Can we now get infinite free peppercorn grinders?”

I shot a furtive glance at the Albertsons employee manning the self-checkouts, afraid he’d report us to a manager who’d kick us out of the store for taking advantage of this extraordinarily good deal, but he was laughing along with us.

“That’s the beauty of the self-checkouts,” he said. “Sometimes you hit the jackpot. It’s like your own personal Las Vegas.”

Mr. Burt and I had better not ever go to Las Vegas. Compulsive personalities, I repeat. With the permission of the cashier, we cleaned out Albertsons’ entire stock of peppercorn and sea salt grinders. (Conveniently, it was a number divisible by three.)

All told, we came home with twenty-one jars and only paid $4. We could have gotten them for $3, if we’d cottoned to the system earlier. Still, that was only $4 for $58.59 worth of pepper, pepper blends, and sea salt.

And at the end, there was another $3 off three coupon.We asked the cashier what we should do with it. He didn’t suggest we leave it for the next customer; he encouraged us to go to another Albertsons and clean out their stock. We didn’t, because the story was already funny enough.

Or was it?

In any case, we have more salt and pepper than we can use by the 2014 expiration date. If you need some, come to our house. You can have three–and our coupon.

(And if you were wondering, our little plan to use a pepper mill for our coriander fell flat, as the jars are constructed with non-removable tops. We didn’t notice anything missing from our steaks.)

I was on my way out of Walmart last week, pushing the buggy with sunglasses in hand, ready for the moment I stepped out into the glaring sunlight. The Burt Squirt, of course, made a grab for my shades. Not wanting to spoil his fun by snatching them away, but also unwilling to risk having my favorite sunglasses broken by the curious and ungentle exploring hands of my seven month-old, I popped them on his face instead. I didn’t have to feign laughter at the round-eyed expression of bewilderment visible through the big, tinted lenses perched on his chubby cheeks. He looked like a baby clown, and I told him so as I pushed him toward the exit.

Cute as he was wearing Mommy’s oversized sunglasses, however, my little boy was not the only person who captivated my attention in that moment. We were, after all, in Walmart. But this was not one of my typical encounters with Walmart clientele.

The husband and wife could barely walk, they were so old and frail, and they were holding hands. I got the feeling they weren’t holding hands because they needed to, but because they wanted to. All those years ago when they discovered they liked each other, then fell in love, they’d held hands; why wouldn’t they continue to do so after a lifetime together had given them reason to love and like each other even more?

Their smiles initially may have been expressions of happiness at being together, defying, for one more day, the physical limitations of age to perform such necessary tasks as grocery shopping, but I soon realized they were grinning at the Burt Squirt and me as we continued to giggle over the sunglasses. I stopped pushing the buggy as the lady released her husband’s hand and haltingly approached us.

“Look at that chubby little foot!”  She caught said chubby little foot in her gnarled hands and squeezed it, cooing and crooning to the Burt Squirt, and beaming up at me. “Oh, congratulations! Congratulations!”

“Congratulations!” her husband echoed, flashing a smile as gummy as the Burt Squirt’s, giving one of the chubby baby cheeks a pinch.

I thanked them, wondering how many of their own children, grandchildren, maybe even great-grandchildren they were thinking of with so much love in their eyes as they played with my baby boy.

“You look so happy,” the lady said with a sigh. “You both look so happy.” Then she clasped hands with her husband again and continued on into Walmart.

I wish I’d thought to tell her that she looked happy, too, and that I hope someday a young mother thinks the same thing about Mr. Burt and me when it’s all we can do to totter into Walmart, hand-in-hand, and squeeze chubby babies who remind us of the Burt Squirt.

Last Monday I had to make two trips to Walmart instead of one (by the way, I’m thinking of turning this into a Walmart blog, since all my posts seem to be about going there) because I somehow made it home without the lunch meat I specifically remember selecting from the refrigerated case and putting in my grocery cart.  No idea what happened to it; I checked my receipt and didn’t pay for turkey breast.  Possibly it stayed in my cart and rotted in the heat until some poor cart-collector found it.

This week, I was leaving Walmart when a voice called, “Ma’am!  Excuse me, Ma’am!”  I turned around to see my cashier chasing me down, waving what appeared to be a packet of seasoning.  “This is yours, Ma’am, you forgot it!”  I thanked her, thinking it was my fajita seasoning, and glad I wasn’t going to have a repeat of last week’s two Walmart trips.

Except that it wasn’t fajita seasoning.  It was buffalo wing seasoning.  Which the cashier insisted I keep, even though I insisted it wasn’t mine.  Maybe I paid for it; I didn’t care enough to check my receipt.

The point of the story:  last week I didn’t get all my groceries, and this week I got extra groceries.  It all evened out.

This wasn’t my only experience this week of situations evening each other out.

Also last Monday at Walmart, I was the victim of parking lot theft.  As in, someone whipped through a row, going the wrong direction, and stole the parking space into which I was just about to turn.  I was incensed!  How could someone be so rude — and to a lady with a baby in the car?!

Later that same shopping trip, I was having some difficulty unpacking my cart to pay for my groceries while holding a Burt Squirt who did not want to be in his carrier.  The man ahead of me in line noticed my struggle and then proceeded to unload my entire cart for me.  (Possibly this explains the lunch meat going AWOL.)

But see what happened?  Someone was rude to me, then someone was extremely kind to me.  It all evened out.

This of course reminds me of the Seinfeld episode “The Opposite” (quite possibly my favorite episode), in which George was down but goes up (by doing the opposite of his instincts), Elaine was up but goes down (thanks to Jujyfruits), and Kramer dubs Jerry “Even Steven” (because he loses a gig and then gets a gig).

That’s me!

(If only blogging about Walmart would reveal my comedic genius and lead to my becoming fabulously wealthy like Mr. Seinfeld.)