This was bound to happen sooner or later:

I had to pick some things up from Costco, the wholesale bulk quantity store which has a location in Workland. I had just put 3 huge packs of drumsticks and a meat-lover’s pizza into my cart and was scanning the rest of the shopping list that The Girl had written down for me on white and pink girly paper–I think it has hearts and lipsticks and shit like that on it. As you can probably guess I was trying to be discrete. It’s bad enough walking around in scrubs with a shopping list on girly paper, but I just know that there have to be people in the store that I’ve worked on over the years who recognize me, but whom I would have no idea about (unless you put a rubber dam and sunglasses on them and show me their xrays). In fact I do know that I’ve seen one of the employees of the store for a consultation. She I remember because I look for her every time I go so that I can avoid her.

On top of all of that, my scrub bottoms were slowly working their way off me because I had my heavy key ring in the back pocket and gravity had proceeded to work against me. The only other pocket was my breast pocket and it had my new phone in it. I didn’t want to stop in the middle of an aisle, undo the knot on the waist tie, and then retie the trousers. The washrooms were at the far opposite end of the store and I figured I’d be done with my list by the time I made it back to that end of the store anyway.

“Hi, Docka!” I hear from somewhere to my left.

I look up and see a Chinese woman smiling at me.

“Uh, Hi!” I say with an embarrassed smile of nonrecognition.

She keeps looking and smiling at me. It feels like a slow clock is ticking in my head as she seems to not realize that no amount of her looking at me will jog my memory.

Finally she says with a moderate accent, “You don’t recognize me, huh?”

“Um. Did I work…on you?”

“You saw my son for his tooth,” she says pointing at her lower left molar area.

“Oh! How’s he doing?” I ask, trying to buy conversational time so that I can gain more context.

“Oh, he’s ok, he’s in grade 8 now, you know. He has other tooth problem. I have tooth problem too, but not for you.”

“Ah. So when did I see your son?”

“Musta been about 2 year ago.”

“Oh,” I say

“Uh huh, 2 year I think.”

“Well you know, I don’t even remember what I did last weekend,” I say.

She doesn’t laugh. Instead she looks in my shopping cart and says, “Eww!”

What now? I think as I look at her disgusted face that is almost positioned inside my shopping cart. I think I can feel my pants starting to drop some more but I’m definitely not going to pull them up now.

“Dat’s a lot of meat! I’m vegetarian.”

I laugh, “Oh, yeah, my wife likes meat, she’s from Romania.”

She looks at me blankly.

“She’s European.”

“Oh so what is…is she..?” she says as she pulls at the skin on her left forearm.

“She’s white.”

“Ah. I see,” she says and then pauses for a bit before she continues, “So any babies?”

And so it went on for the next 5 minutes until I was able to extricate myself. It’s a good thing I didn’t have Kissaki’s tampons in my cart. Or that might have started a whole other conversation.