Just another day at the commissary

Well this was a first this morning.

There I was....I had just entered the commissary for my weekly shopping trip. I walked through the doors and held my breath as I walked through the stinky flowers in the breezeway and then when I stepped into the store, I changed my sunglasses out for my regular glasses. Without my glasses, I'm about as good as a blind person.

The free coffee by the door caught my eye. The sign said "Free coffee while you shop!" I briefly considered trying the hazelnut kind, but quickly walked away before my consideration turned into reality.

I checked my list. Where to first? Ah yes, lemons. I walked to the lemons, felt a couple of them up to see if they were hard or soft and settled on one, which I promptly tossed into one of the produce bags and then after checking my list, I wandered over to the pepper display.

Habanero pepper? Hmm....I see jalapeno....pablano....bell....chili...where is habanero? With no habanero peppers to be found, I settled on getting a jalapeno pepper in it's place, except someone was standing in front of them and wasn't budging.

So I decided to just go back later, after I'd found my parsley and mint leaves. I headed to the fresh herbs display only to find they were out of stock of mint leaves. OK....moving on to parsley. I looked...and looked...and looked....where in the world is the parsley??

I had my cart sort of in the middle of the produce section and I was turned around scanning the sides of the displays looking for a parsley bunch when a male voice interrupted my search.

"Ma'am?"

I ignored the voice. After all, I've only lived here 2 weeks, the voice wasn't my husband's, I haven't dropped anything out of the cart, the kiddo didn't have any shoes that she could have thrown off, so what could this male voice possibly want with me??

A second later..."Ma'am??" a little more loudly.

Startled, I turned to look at the staff sergeant from security forces (they are the military police of the air force) who was standing at the edge of my cart.

With my attention, he casually continued "I'm going to have to ask you to leave the store."

My first thought was "What in the WORLD did my child do???" I glanced down at her, but she was happily sucking her thumb, looking around a little doe-eyed and on the verge of sleep. No, she couldn't have done anything. So, what did *I* do?? Was it because I touched 3 lemons, but only bought 1?? My mind started going a mile a minute. Everyone should be washing their produce anyway, I mean why would you not wash your produce because people in the store touch it and it's not been washed between being picked from the farm to riding in the truck to being put out here on the shelves at the commissary. Should I just go back and buy those lemons? I mean they're only like 30 cents or so, it won't break the bank.

So, in the split second that all of this thundered through my mind but before I could utter a word, he turned on his heel and asked the woman who was getting asparagus spears to leave the store as well. She asked if he was serious and he said he was very serious and that he needed every single person out of the store immediately.

Dumbfounded, I just stood there. The staff sergeant wandered off down the meat aisle and spoke to some of the shoppers, presumably asking them to vacate the premises.

Since I had my lone little lemon in the cart, I didn't want to take the cart out of the store with us and be accused of stealing, so I took a cue from Asparagus Lady and just left my cart parked right there and carried my kid out of the store.

Since this is southern MS and it was already 86 degrees by 9:30am, we went to sit in the car with the AC blasting. We watched as everyone slowly filtered out of the store. In the 4 minutes I'd been inside, 3 or 4 cop cars had pulled up and blocked off access to anyone trying to turn into the parking lot.

I began to panic. What was going on? A gas leak? A bomb threat? An exercise? I am a civilian, I don't have time to play war games with my feisty 2-year old in tow. Speaking of her, she started melting down the moment I put her back in the car. Totally content in the race car cart....totally not content in the boring car. I sighed to myself and decided I would give it about 10 minutes and see if we were able to be let back in. Hopefully it was just SF out playing their war games where they do exercises to see how they would do in real life if a situation were to occur.

Eventually the cops chased everyone to the back of the parking lot and started checking the cars in the lot to see if anyone was sitting in them. Those that were, would end up being asked to either leave or get out of the car and walk to the back of the parking lot in the 86 degree high-humidity heat. Just what my 2-year old needs.

As you can imagine, we just left. Without food. With nothing for lunch because the cupboards were bare in my house. We ended up eating bland leftover spaghetti but since my daughter has food allergies, I had to literally scrounge through all of the cabinets to make something for her that was allergen friendly. It ended up being sort of a repeat of what she had for breakfast. Oh well, she won't die from breakfast for breakfast and breakfast for lunch, right?

I finally went back to the commissary after naptime. It was, of course, packed. There is a reason I do my shopping at 9:30am, people! There is no one in the store and my kid is on her best behavior at that time of day! By the time we went at 4pm, she was cranky, annoyed, bawling and just generally not happy. The place was packed and they didn't have a few things in stock that I needed. Of course it couldn't be the unimportant stuff, it had to be diapers that they were out of.

Just another day at the commissary. Yep.