Friday Musing

So ... as I was shopping in Wal-Mart this week (the first week of October, for the record), I decided to peruse that all-purpose area in the back of the store that, until recently, was the garden area. It has now become home to all things fall and Halloween. But ... staring at me from the opposite end of an aisle of bloody masks, long wigs and Batman costumes was a furry black bear, clinging to a snowy sled and touting a Santa hat. Yes. A Santa hat. Next to this furry guy, plastic sheep and donkeys swathed in phrases like "peace on earth" and "noel" stared blankly across the aisle toward shelves of porcelain ghosts and arch-backed black cats who had "boo" and "RIP" printed around them.

At K-Mart, the 8-foot plastic globe that now houses the Grim Reaper stood cozily next to a faux-frosted Christmas tree -- complete with lights -- which sat in front of a bin of on-sale Halloween candy. This is life in America in the 21st century: You can celebrate all the chocolaty goodness of being a pagan or wiccan one month, then revert to being a 17th-century Puritan the next (complete with buckled hats, construction-paper pumpkins and felt turkeys), only to become a posh Victorian-era Christmas caroler the next ... all in time to come right back to the current century in preparation for a rockin' new year ... complete with Dick Clark or his stand-in.

Back at the zoo, aka the office, the woman next to me has wasted no time getting her fingers in her mouth and is noisily sucking/chewing on them. She then wipes them off on my pages and then wants to use my pens to mark my pages up ... Lysol, anyone?