The Five Pound Bucket.

Went shopping over to Sam's Club in Portland today with my wife. I didn't want to go, but I could tell it was not an option given the suggestive look and the baseball bat she had hidden behind her back.

I do not like to go shopping for those everyday things. Food, soap, underwear. Bores me to tears. And Sam's with it's industrial sized packaging makes the trip not just boring but tiring also. Lift a few 30 packs of canned beans into the cart, 20 pounds of frozen fish sticks and few five gallon buckets of 10w40 and by the time the cart's full, I want to rent some punk to wheel it out to the car.

But Sam's holds a serious fascination for my wife. The calculating domestic that she is, I can just imagine the 2 months of meals tumbling around in her brain as we leave the parking lot. Somehow she has convinced herself that a monthly trip to Sam's negates the necessity of that twice weekly visit to the local super super market in town. She won't admit that it doesn't, and wisely I do not comment one way or the other.

So the first thing I see when we pull into the parking lot is a mom and son duo struggling to stuff a brand new high impact driveway basketball backboard into the back seat of their American version of a Mini Cooper. Junior is on the inside pulling and Mom is tossing all her weight into it on the outside. As we pass by, they have it stuck half in and half out. Mom looks at me pleadingly like somehow I will magically turn this five pound bucket into a ten pound one and the box will instantly slip cleanly into the watch pocket that is their back seat. After years of training in the fine art of exercising futility, I avoid eye contact and pick up the pace to the front door. "You are on your own darling" I think. "I have my own 5 pound bucket to fill in a little while."