Going UP? No....Going Down~

I have a friend.  I know it may be hard to imagine, but I do have a friend.  Target.  My friend is Target.  They have everything at that place.  You can swoop in and gather everything you need to survive this life and stomp out with your arms full of life sustaining materials.  They have food stuffs, clothes, household items and best of all they have a snack bar. Food is the cornerstone of my life.  I am partial to the GIANT pretzels with pebble sized salt on top. 

One time my friend, Target, failed me.  It was a failure of such gargantuan proportion that I haven’t really ever forgiven her.  Mmm Hmmm..  The Target near my home is a Double Decker Target. (That’s how they do it in the big city.)  There is a set of escalators in the middle of the store.  So you can glide up from electronics to the household items and back down for the toy department. 

One afternoon I was just about to go down on the escalator with a few things in my arms as I managed the unthinkable.  My clodhoppers got hung up somewhere between step one and three and I managed a less than un-noticeable “tumble” down the escalator.  This was no ordinary tumble.  This was grandiose.  The articles in my arms flew out like projectile vomit and over the side railing crashing down on the floor below me.  We were lucky nobody was on the receiving end of these airborne wonders.  This “fireworks” like display was coupled with much guffaw and grunting noise as I went head over heels down the moving steps.  Why would I be laughing?  The best conclusion I can come to is that I laugh when I don’t want people to be concerned about something that is either highly embarrassing or highly uncomfortable.  These both apply here. I was cognizant enough to hear the fabric on my khakis rip on the way down.

After coming to a complete and final stop on the lower level I realized how embarrassing it is in your late thirties to be so clumsy that you could be mistaken for a child.  With a bruised ego I gathered the bag of corn chips that has sprung a leak allowing the newly shaped flakes of corn chips to dribble out.  I them looked for a brief moment for the box of toothpaste that had been airborne not more than thirty seconds before. It had gone “missing” during the tumble. – Nowhere to be found.  About this time I realized that I hadn’t surveyed the damage to myself.  Mmm Hmmm.  It gets better.

My leg had a few cuts with freshly emerging blood, but the kicker was that my skivvies were in full view from the rear because of my newly re-designed khakis which had sprung a leak as the rear pocket had been ripped off.  Where was it?  The pocket and part of my khakis were in the teeth at the bottom of the escalator.  Let me just tell you people something.  The escalator was hungry that day.  It wasted no time making threads out of my pocket.

With the latest development of my skivvies clad rump showing I placed one hand over the hole and walked/limped to the car.

The lesson here?  Hold the hand rail.