The embarrassment of the middle-aged lover

I’m in the drug store.  I don’t like this drug store.  Its layout makes no sense to me.  I get lost as if in a labyrinth.  Takes me several circuits to find two items that usually turn out to be across from each other in the same aisle.  Tonight, I’m wandering around in there, looking for this and that, and on one of my circuits I nearly run into a woman---I’d put her around forty---who has just stepped back in shock from the condom display.

She turned to me with a hopeless, pleading look and for a second I was terrified she was about to ask me for a recommendation.  There are, after all, a lot of choices.  But she said, “When did they get so expensive?”

To which I fortunately did not reply, “The price of everything keeps going up and up, doesn’t it?”

I said something like, “Mumble, um, mumble, uh, yeah, mumble, oh, are the toothbrushes over there?”

Because I’m suave that way.

I’m guessing she hadn’t been shopping for condoms in a while.  I’ll leave it for you to decide for yourselves why she was doing it tonight and if it was just the cost that had her reeling.

I continued my search for greeting cards and vitamins which meant that a few minutes later I swung back around to that aisle and when I did she was still there only she had moved down one display to the lubricants.  Which she stood stock still before, with her arms out at her side, her whole attitude begging, “Dear God, just kill me now!”

I hope they’re having a nice night.

Comments

[actor212]

Until you got to the lubricants, I had a perfectly innocuous story of helping her teenage daughter out...

[Sue]

Well, hopefully it was a big box type of drug store with condoms, lubricants and alcohol (not the rubbing kind) all within grabbing distance. Because life is not always a romantic erectile dysfunction commercial, ya know?

[El Jefe]

Sue,

That was a magnificent comment. Really captures something about not-young-any-longer lovers. I was going to say it could be nominated for a Shorty Award in tweet form but that might put an unfortunate turn on the discussion.