Ah, nostalgia. This thread brings back memories.
When I was a young lad, my mother often conscripted me into long, seemingly pointless campaigns of store-browsing. Not shopping, of course; just browsing. I blame our family's lack of daughters for the insufferable Hell that I was subjected to as a 10 year old boy. I'm proud that I never developed a tumor out of boredom.
Back then my mother was just beginning to near the 90-degree precipice of health decline that so many women experience at the onset of middle age... and I remember that, sometimes, on what was for me a lucky day... she would be happily engaged in some mundane activity only to, for no reason that I could see at the time, freeze.
And I mean FREEZE; mid-motion, dead in her tracks... with a look in her eyes that, I imagine, must be awfully similar to when an innocent deer (or other woodland critter) realizes that, not only is a set of bright lights heading furiously in its direction, but that those lights belong to a murderous Ford F-350 and that there is simply NO WAY to avoid this imminent, grisly spectre of death.
I got to know these moments well because they were always followed by the same sentence, always delivered in the same grim, shaken-yet-determined voice:
"Get in the car. We're going home, NOW."
Hot damn, that always meant I was free for the rest of the day.
Edited, Dec 4th 2006 11:35am by rckndl