While browsing Walmart’s Valentine card selection the other day, I kept coming across variations on a theme: “They say that the longer a couple stays together, the more they start to look alike. Good thing we’re both so good looking!” Apart from the fact that this trope is not particularly funny, I eschew cards emblazoned with it because it’s simply not true of Mr. Burt and me. (Though, come to think of it, I do wear a lot more t-shirts and hoodies than I did when I met him eight years ago…)

Now, if there were cards that said, “They say that the longer a couple stays together, the more they start to think alike. Good thing we’re both so exceptionally intelligent and clever!” I’d be all over those.

Then again, that truth may be self-evident without its being expressed on a greeting card.

We don’t go overboard on Valentine’s Day in the Burt house, but we do celebrate it. I mean, why wouldn’t you take advantage of an excuse to exchange silly cards and eat candy and have sex? Not to mention it’s such a cute holiday–and you know a holiday’s legit when it’s got its own kitchen towels and dishes. (I’ve got the dishes, but will be hitting Target or Kohls tomorrow for clearance decor.)

And sock monkeys.

When I saw the sock monkeys at Walmart, in Valentine pinks and reds (or robin’s egg blue or jailbird stripes for the men in your life) with hearts stitched on their chests, I caved to consumer pressure and bought a pair for Mr. Burt and the Burt Squirt. (Monkeys are a bit of a thing in our house, what with Mr. Burt being a code monkey and the Burt Squirt just being a plain monkey and owning a bit of monkey paraphernalia. But I won’t pretend that any other thought than Must have Love Monkeys! influenced my decision to buy.)

Friday night, Mr. Burt went out to do a bit of Valentine shopping for me. Before he left, I told him he didn’t have to make a big deal of it.

“I just got you something little and silly,” I said. And lingerie. But I’m not so into being Even Steven that I wanted Mr. Burt to come home from Walmart with silk boxers or, God forbid, a banana hammock, so I kept that part to myself.

As it turned out, our Valentine gift exchange was a little more Even Steven than I’d imagined. Actually, I had imagined that Mr. Burt might be taken with Walmart’s Love Monkeys (that’s kind of a disturbing phrase, and I will never use it again) as I had been, and wouldn’t it be funny if he got me one, too? But I didn’t really think he would, as just a few days prior I’d remarked about how much I’m missing that gene that cares about stuffed animals.

Anyway, Mr. Burt opened his Valentine present from me and drew out a black and white-striped Love Monkey.

I opened my Valentine present from Mr. Burt and drew out a red Love Monkey.

(And when a boy Love Monkey loves a girl Love Monkey very much…)

If the Love Monkeys alone didn’t prove just how similarly Mr. Burt and I think, there was also the little issue of our Valentine date destination.

Earlier in the week I’d emailed my mom to ask if she’d be free to babysit Saturday, and when she wrote back to ask what time she should come over, I asked Mr. Burt, who was at his computer, when he wanted to go out.

“Noonish,” he said.

“What do you want to do at noon?”

“Hang on, let me check.” He started clicking around with his mouse.

“Check what?”

He didn’t answer my question, just said, “Yep, that’ll work.”

“What’ll work?” I asked, confused and intrigued, because we hadn’t even discussed what we might do for Valentine’s Day, not having secured Squirt care until the moment before.

“It’s a surprise.”

A surprise would be fun–except that I had this not-so-surprising feeling that Mr. Burt was going to take me ice skating. I had no good reason for suspecting this. We hadn’t discussed ice skating, not in relation to Valentine’s Day; a few weeks earlier the Groupon had been for ice skating, but when I mentioned it to Mr. Burt he was in the middle of a computer game and it’s a crapshoot whether he’ll hear you or not when you talk to him while he’s gaming.

Sure enough, Saturday rolled around, and when Mr. Burt asked me if I had any idea where we were going and I told him I thought he was taking me ice skating, his mouth fell open and he said, “How did you know? I didn’t give you any hints at all.”

It was true. We hadn’t discussed our Valentine date at all. And I hadn’t seen his email confirming his coupon purchase, because we have separate email accounts on separate computers. And the coupon he’d purchased hadn’t even been the Groupon one I told him about before.

“That’s not fair,” Mr. Burt whined as we drove down the tollway toward Stonebriar Mall. “I wanted to surprise you.”

I patted his arm consolingly. “You couldn’t have done anything differently. There’s just no accounting for ESP.”

We’re just a couple of Love Monkeys, with two hearts that beat as one.

(And we’re not too shabby on the ice, either.)

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.

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.)

The day before yesterday I went grocery shopping.

Well — shopping was my intent.

What the outing actually turned out to be was more like grocery looting.

It was an accident! I didn’t mean to steal that package of quarter-pound Angus hamburger patties! I fully intended to pay for it, even if it was at the back of my mind that it was $4.68 I didn’t have to spend if I would just use the ground beef I’d bought for a quarter of the price at Super H-Mart a few weeks before and frozen. But A) Walmart’s pre-made Angus patties make far jucier burgers than the lean beef I use for tacos or mostaccioli and B) I make hamburger patties about as well as I make pancakes. And anyway, when you think about the fact that it’s $4.68 (plus the trifling cost of buns and condiments) for two meals for two people, that works out to be cheaper than ordering off the value menu at a fast food burger joint, with a better-than-restaurant-quality burger.

Even cheaper if you don’t pay for the meat.

Which is what I discovered I’d done as I lifted the Burt Squirt’s carseat carrier out of the shopping cart and discovered that the package of hamburger patties had slipped underneath it in the course of our shopping trip, escaping being rung up with the rest of my groceries.

Yes, I suppose I am blaming my thievery on my infant. Who might have been sound asleep at the time the incident occurred. If it hadn’t been for the fact that I needed to get him home and feed him (we’ll ignore the fact that once I got him home he continued to nap in his carseat carrier for another hour before he requested second lunch) I would have gone back in Walmart and paid for my meat.

Or I might have; whether he needed to eat or not, the Burt Squirt turns into a whiny creature if the buggy isn’t moving at all times, and we’d have been at a stand still at the customer service desk while I paid for my meat. As he’d spend a good part of our shopping trip whining before he eventually decided to take a nap, I wasn’t keen for a repeat performance.

Then there was the fact that I’d already unloaded the rest of my groceries into the trunk of the car, including milk and yogurt and cheese and chicken and other items that really shouldn’t sit out in 80 degree heat while I resolved my little shoplifting issue.

And anyway, there was always the chance they might not make me pay for it anyway, as a reward for my honesty. Right? Like the time in second grade when I noticed my teacher had failed to deduct a misspelled word from my spelling test grade, pointed out her error, and she said in reward for my honesty she’d let my 100 stand.

That character award she gave me at the end of the year for honesty should be revoked.

Because I decided that $4.68 wasn’t worth anyone’s time.

The purloined sirloin now currently resides in my refrigerator, and Mr. Burt and I are looking forward to tasty Angus burgers one night next week.

Hopefully my guilt won’t turn the taste bitter in my mouth.

And hopefully no one employed by Walmart is reading this post, as they prosecute shoplifters. How many years did Jean Valjean get in the Bagne of Toulon for stealing bread? (Only he did it on purpose. Because he was, you know, starving.)