I’m not much of a shopper, which is kind of odd because my
horoscope says that people born under my sign like to have the very best of
everything. It’s possible, just possible that telling fortunes and predicting a
person’s fate from the location of celestial bodies may not be as accurate as I
once thought. I do shop, but I don’t like to spend money which kind of puts a
crimp into the whole shopping thing.
It is usually around this time of year that I will venture
to a few of the larger shopping malls in our city. I particularly like Chinook
Mall, but my wife just hates it for some reason. Needless to say, I am rarely
at Chinook Mall. I make do with Southcentre Mall, Cross Iron Mills and Market
Mall which have pretty much everything a person who avoids shopping needs. Once
every two or ten years, I will find myself shopping downtown in the maze of
shops created by our “Plus 15” walkway system. You can get all around the
downtown without once going outside. There was a movie about the Plus 15 system
called “Waydowntown, where several guys tried to stay inside longer than
everyone else.
Whenever I find myself at these big malls I generally will
get lost either in the parking lot or inside. I don’t know why, but I think
that the malls are just a big circle and if you just keep walking you will
eventually get back to where you started. I can tell you for a fact that this
is not true. Even if it were, you would have to remember exactly where you came
into the mall from the parking lot. I make a point of noting the stores where I
enter the mall, but by the time I have been walking for an hour or so, I have
no idea what stores I noted. Most of the time I have Louise with me, and
between the two of us, we can figure out where the car is parked eventually.
Years ago a buddy of mine and I decided to do a road trip to
Quebec City to visit his French
speaking cousins. Neither he nor I had a car, but we had money so we rented a
white van for our trip. Our rational was that we could save time by taking
turns sleeping in the back of the van. It probably worked, but I can’t remember,
as most of the trip was made in a smoky haze. Just outside of Montreal ,
we had the munchies so we pulled into a mall. We locked the van and walked into
the mall. It was really cool, all of the stores were made to look like shops in
an old European village. What a great place to wander around in!
All good things come to an end and we still had miles to go
before getting to Quebec City .
Normally, I have trouble finding the mall entrance I came in by, but this time
neither of us could find any exit from the mall at all. Everything looked like
a European village and it seems that once you enter a European village, you can
never leave. After asking several people (the first three only spoke French),
we finally found a way out of the mall.
That left two stoned guys looking over a sea of vehicles in
probably the largest parking lot I had ever seen. We were looking for a rental
vehicle that neither of us knew at all. We figured that we would space
ourselves twenty yards apart and check every white van in the lot. You would be
surprised how many white vans were in that parking lot. It took over an hour,
but we did find the van, but we were hungry again. We decided that we would
look for a place once we got out of the parking lot. I can’t remember what
happened after that, I can only assume we “celebrated” finding the van by
getting more confused than ever.
We must have made it to the cousin’s place because I
remember waking up to a beautiful girl blowing smoke in my face. Well, either
that or I had died and found my way to Muslim Heaven. But, that’s a story for
another time…
