Just Joe – The Things You Don’t Know

It happened before Christmas last year. I had gone to town with my wife, Gayla. She had several stops she needed to make, including a major stop at WalMart. You might be wondering why I went with her. I needed the “points”— I was really low on points, on the verge of desperate. So, there I was in WalMart.

Gayla let me push the cart for her. She is nicelike that. Then it happened. She told me that she had forgotten to get some Rotel. And she asked me if I would go get some. Talk about major points… She said it was on the aisle that we had just come down. How hard could this be?

I took off for the Rotel although I wasn’t exactly clear on what that was. But I wasn’t about to tell her that. Soon, I found myself looking at every item on that aisle determined I was going to deliver on the Rotel request. This may surprise you but I didn’t find it.

So, I decided that I would go back to the end of the aisle and work my way down that aisle one more time in search of Rotel. That’s when I found it. Not the Rotel. I will finish that story in a minute. But I found it. There on a shelve about eye level, I spotted a bottle of Mole Paste.

I have to tell you that stopped me in my tracks. I began to think about what I was looking at. My first dilemma was to decide whether this was for those discolored places on our skin. But I couldn’t figure out how paste would help with that… So, then I decided it must be for moles – you know those gopher-like creatures that tunnel through our yards.

But that created another dilemma. Was this mole paste something that you would use to stick body parts back on a mole that had lost them. But that made no sense to me. So then I wondered if mole paste was something you could use to paste a whole mole to some other creature, you know, like a gopher. Why would you want to glue a Mole to anything? On second thought, why wouldn’t you want to glue a Mole to something? All I needed was a Mole.

As I stood there contemplating this new thing in my life, a couple of handy dandy WalMart employees happened by. Don’t think I didn’t want to have a bit of a conversation with them about Mole Paste. In fact, I wanted to ask them why they would a put glue-like substances (paste) in the food section. But I didn’t ask them that. They looked too busy.

Instead I asked them where the Rotel was. They told me it was one aisle over. They were right. But that means my darling wife misled me and sent me on a wild goose chase for Rotel. But I showed her. I found the Rotel and delivered it to our shopping cart. How about that for some points? Boy, did I want to sneak some Mole Paste in Gayla’s cart. Then when we got home, I could ask her what she bought that for. And I bet she would have an answer because she is smart like that, and she has been married to me for several years. But I didn’t. I was scared.

There are a bunch of lessons that could be learned from this incident in my life. One lesson would be just when you think you know something about almost everything, Mole Paste shows up as evidence that you didn’t know it all. Two, WalMart has everything. I think the next time I go there, I am going to ask a handy-dandy WalMart employee in the hardware department for some Mole Paste or maybe some Gopher Glue. Three, you should never get so low on points that you have to go to WalMart, especially during the holiday season. Four, even if your wife doesn’t know the exact aisle Rotel is on, she probably doesn’t know what aisle the Mole Paste is on either. But if she ever asks me to pick up some, I am going to be all over it.