Grocery Singing

Going grocery shopping all by myself is a spectacular rarity.  It takes twenty-five minutes to drive to the grocery store and the same amount of time to get home.  This equals out to fifty minutes of pure, sometimes violent, blissful sing-time.  Just me and my radio, turned up loud.

I had one of these rare little fiascos yesterday. 

I sprinted to the car, hopped in and turned up the volume knob.  The trip there was perfect, to say the least.

After shopping and shoving all the groceries into the trunk of the car, I returned my cart to the cart corral and then slid into the driver’s seat.  I noticed that I had left the cell phone sitting on the passenger's seat.  There were eight missed calls, all from home.  I dialed the home number and the answering machine picked up, so I figured it must not be too important.  I threw the phone back onto the seat and turned the radio back up and sang my heart out.

When I walked through the front door with eighty bags of groceries hanging from my arms, my wonderful little family was in a huddle on the floor.  They were laughing ridiculously hard.  I love laughing, so I threw the bags onto the floor and joined the huddle, asking, “What are we laughing at?”

Then I saw that they were gathered around the phone.  I instantly knew that there must be a funny message.  Probably a pocket-dial.  I LOVE pocket dials.  Mae hit the PLAY button on the answering machine and I heard the most awful sound.  Me.  Singing.  Loudly, wildly and so far out of tune that I didn’t even recognize the song at first. 

I asked how many times they had listened to this and still laughing, Kyler was able to choke out, “A LOT.”  That’s when I noticed tears streaming down his face and I knew that something had to be done.  As I hit the DELETE button, I heard the word “no” in slow motion from three different mouths and soon after, the laughter came to an abrupt halt.

As I began putting the groceries away, Kenny asked if he should turn on the radio so I could sing along while I did my chore.  I told him that would not be necessary and that maybe he should focus on more important things, like figuring out where he’s going to sleep from now on.

Our answering machine has since been disabled.