Where Did You Come From?

Every once in awhile, the full moon comes out and the crazies abound everywhere. And for those people who do not have a full moon to blame their abnormal behaviors on, well, perhaps they are singing to a different tune. So you would think.

On Labor Day, the four of us went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, to the Chicago History Museum, to the lakefront and finally, out to eat to Sweet Tomatoes. In other words, it was a labor intensive non-stop day with my husband and I taking up the lead, an over extended grandpa in the back and a toddler in desperate need of a good nap taking up the middle. It was fun, but alas, this is not the true nature of this story.

As we were driving out of the parking lot near the lake, a young boy, probably around ten, had his pants down and was mooning us from the sidewalk. His pants were clearly down to his kneecaps, his derriere showing for any passerby to see. Worst of all, his father and mother were by the side of the car laughing at him. Stephane and I agreed, if we had a son at that age who thought it was funny to show his backside to cars as they went by, he would have quite a slap on that backside to convince him otherwise.

On our way back, we stopped at Sweet Tomatoes, the salad bar buffet, where at dessert time, I took a small bowl of tapioca pudding, and while in line, I put it down beside me to get something, and a young little preteen girl runs up to me, sticks her finger in my bowl of tapioca pudding and licks off her finger. I must have given a look of shock, because she stared up at me with an ice cream mustache, probably ice cream from some other person’s ice cream bowl, and said, "Sorry" and then hopped away.

Then tonight, I went to Sam's Club to get some groceries. It wasn't very busy and very few people were there. As I took my cart and started pushing it down the long aisle, this fuzzy headed middle-aged woman with a long brightly colored skirt, bobby socks and 1950's shoes walked up to my cart and stayed glued next to me while I went down the aisle. At first I was like, someone must have lost their mentally challenged aunt and for some reason she's hanging out with me, but then after several minutes, up from her side came a clip board and binder and she said in a thick Eastern European accent with some kind of speech impediment, "Would you like to buy a sunroom?"

Now if you've ever been to Sam's Club or Costco, you know as soon as you step an inch past the checkout counters, these people come at you, trying to sell you sunrooms, cell phones and whatever else they can attack you with right when you get into the door. So I relaxed a bit once I knew I wasn't being followed by some crazy lady but instead was being followed by a weird woman selling sunrooms.

"No thank you," I said as she went on with her spiel. "See," she said. She flipped through the pictures, quickly trying to keep up with me while I was trying to get away with my cart. "No," I said, "I'm not interested" and turned the cart immediately to the right to enter another aisle and to hopefully, be out of her selling zone.

Fifteen minutes later, I'm on the other side of the store looking at outfits for Olivia and I see the fuzzy headed woman heading straight toward me again. I move into the hanging clothes a bit more, hoping she doesn't see me however, there are only around ten people in the entire Sam's Club so I guess she felt she had to be persistent with a low volume of customers to badger.

She stopped directly beside me. Obviously, me hiding behind the clothes rack didn't work. "Would you like to buy a sunroom?" she said again in her thick accent and meaningless expression.

"You already asked me," I pointed out and with no response she immediately left and was on to a new customer she spotted coming down the aisle.

I know there are crazy people out there - people with no social discretion, people who think everything is their domain to claim like the tapioca pudding girl, people that are, as the saying goes, "two colors short of a rainbow" which can certainly describe the fuzzy headed sunroom saleswoman from Sam's Club. (And her kaleidoscope of a skirt I might add.)

The world is filled with people that you wonder, "Where did you come from?" Because sometimes it sure doesn't feel like they came from planet Earth.

When I first started working at United Airline's answering phones, we blamed it on the full moon. We all knew what kind of customer phone calls we were going to get when there was a full moon that night.

Like clockwork, they would call us. And we knew it would always be an interesting night when we worked the late shift.

The only thing I can say is there must be a full moon out this whole entire week because I certainly had my fill of strange people.

So the next time you run into one of them, someone you consider crazy, strange, peculiar, a little bit off - because you know you will, we've all seen them out there - stop and say, "Where did you come from?" and then thank God nobody classifies you as one of them.