Lettuce Dance

Here at Of Cabbages and Kings, we dig deep into life’s important issues. Like the disorientation, trauma and emotional scars I experienced at lunch yesterday because the Giant Eagle grocery store reversed their salad bar.

Oh, it’s not gone. Just reversed. Totally backwards. Bizarro-world. Salad and veggies USED TO BE on the side facing the store entrance, and now toppings, dressing and yogurt are in their place.

You would not believe the sort of mayhem this has caused.

Okay, okay, feel free to laugh. I’m aware how lucky I am that my biggest personal challenge is in not knowing where my mixed greens are.

Except I am not only a creature of habit, I am a creature of habit who was having a very “off” morning.

When I tumbled out of bed and stumbled to the kitchen, and poured myself a cup of ambition, for reasons unknown to MYSELF-- let alone Dolly Parton-- I promptly poured myself a SECOND coffee, in a separate mug sitting right next to it….

A mug which I actually don't remember taking down from the shelf, and which I ALSO seemed fully-prepared to drink. Because, of course, there is no one else to drink this.

Yet, there it was. Coffee. Twice. Black and no sweetener. Just how I don’t like it.

When you find yourself having a two-mug morning for a single-mug beverage, and you don't recall how it is you take your coffee, you begin to wonder just how the rest of the day is going to fare.

You begin to wonder whether you might not just head off to work, but suddenly wake up in Peoria in your jim-jams, with bad breath, no cash, no ID, and no way to tell the boss you’ll be a skosh late.

So the Salad Bar Switcheroo seemed to be just one more extension of the muddling two-mug morning. My only consolation was, there were others just as confused as I was, and java had nothing to do with it.

Oh, how we bobbed. We weaved. We swept from one side of the counter to the other like candidates for Dancing with the Stars. Only, you know, with less showmanship and costuming, and more bad posture and business suits.

And as I boogied around the buffet, I realized it was like going into one of those Wal-Marts or Targets that's arranged in the mirror image from the branch you usually go to. You know the ones? You step through the automatic doors and while it essentially LOOKS like the store you know, something just feels a bit... off. Wrong. Unsettling. Like: here anything could happen.

Like you wouldn't be surprised if Rod Serling showed up to narrate your shopping experience. Or Stephen King stepped in to bag your groceries.

But honestly, it's not that big a deal in the Great Scheme of Things, and we humans, we're made to adapt. So if lettuce continues to exist on the COMPLETELY WRONG side of the salad bar, then I will learn from it, and change, and grow.

But if today, I step into that grocery store and Rod Serling sidles up and asks me to merengue? I'll KNOW I never did wake up right yesterday.

And if so, will someone please call my boss and tell them I'm running a tad behind? I hear Peoria is beautiful in spring.


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