Today I went to the Dollar store to get a couple of things. I parked right in front in my bright yellow car. I went inside and up and down the aisles, found what I needed,checked out and walked out of the store and got into my car. As I started to back a way, a big burly guy came barreling through the door and yelled at me to stop. Right behind him out the door was his big burly wife and she ran to the passenger side of my car and tried to open it. It was locked. Then both of them looked over a couple of spaces and saw their identical bright yellow car and mouthed the word sorry and pointed at his car. Apparently, they thought I was a car thief and that I was stealing their car. I must say it rattled me a little as I drove away because of the open carry thing and what if they had shot first and asked questions later.
That’s not the first time that’s happened to me though it is the first time in that car. Several years ago I went shopping in Tulsa by myself. I parked outside the Gordman’s store in my blue and wood panel minivan and went in the store. When I came out of the store, I hit the unlock button on my keyring a few times and sauntered out to the van. I opened the door, got into the van, sat my purse in the passenger seat and then heard a blood curdling scream “ What are you doing?” from back seat. I had inadvertently gotten into an identical van. One in which a mom was in the backseat changing a baby diaper. I gave her quite a scare and it took a few minutes for my own heart to stop racing. I apologized saying that I thought it was my van and looked up to see my van in the same parking spot, but in the next row over.
As I thought about the two cases of mistaken identity I thought about one year when my mom was in a hurry at the grocery store to get all the fixings to make a big Thanksgiving dinner. She had gone up and down the aisles of the United grocery store in Kingfisher and had a buggy full of groceries when she realized she needed something in an aisle she had passed. So she left her cart in the aisle she was in, went and got the item she needed, came back and proceeded to shop. It wasn’t until she got to the checkout and the clerk started unloading the cart that she realized that she had taken someone else’s cart and that only the items on the top of the cart were hers. Rather than face the embarrassment of admitting what she’d done, she simply paid for the groceries and took them home. Then she went back and started over again to get the items she had put in her original cart that was lost in the shuffle. I wonder if the person that took her cart realized that she had the wrong cart too and just did the same thing. My mom had a lot of weird things in her cabinet when we came over that year, things that she had never bought before and had no use for. Like pickled okra and canned artichoke hearts and collard greens. We laughed along with her as she told the story of the grocery cart mixup. I can still hear her telling the story. She told it as if it was the most normal thing in the world to have happen and as if buying double groceries to avoid embarrassment was what anyone would have done.
And while I don’t recall her ever getting in the wrong car, she did once call the police at the mall to report her car stolen when she came out and didn’t see it and was certain where she had left it. Apparently not that certain because they found it around the corner in the Dillards Parking lot, and she had come out of Foleys.
One day I came home from work to find 2 dogs in the backyard, identical except that my husky Shelby had two blue eyes and the duplicate dog had one brown and one blue. I stood there puzzled at how the imposter dog had gotten there when my doorbell rang. Mynext door neighbor Mark told me that Shelby had gotten out somehow and that he and the kids had corralled her back to the gate and put her back inside. He was coming to tell me that I might want to check for holes. I invited him and his kids to come take a look and we had a good laugh about the two Shelbys. I was gonna keep her until I found her owner, but the next morning she had escaped and was no where to be found.
And then there was the time I had flown to Tennessee for a “date”. And had my college term paper in my suitcase so that I could look it over and make corrections when I got back because it was going to be due the morning after I got home. I waited and waited and waited at the luggage turnstile for my bag to appear and it didn’t. I was in full panic mode. AN F for an entire semester of work loomed in my future. The bag going around and around on the turnstile looked a lot like mine, but it was bigger and a different color of blue than mine. I finally gave up and went to the counter to file a lost baggage claim when the person who took my suitcase called the counter to let them know. A short time later, I had my suitcase and my term paper back in my hands. I bet that happens more often than not.
In fact, a couple of years later I took the boys to Las Vegas and when we returned I left them to get our bags while I went and go the car and pulled up to the curb. I popped the trunk, they loaded the bags and off we went to Muskogee. It wasn’t until we got home and I started unloading the car that I realized we had one extra bag. I called the airport and they had a stressed out woman from Broken Arrow at the counter filling out a missing bag claim. She was near hysterical because all of her medications were in the bag and it was “a matter of life or death” as she deemed it. So I got back into the car and drove to Broken Arrow at 1:00 a.m.in the morning (our flight had arrived at 10:45) and met her at a Denny’s to give her the bag. She was still upset, asking me if I didn’t think to count the number of bags, didn’t I realize I had one too many, yadadadad. Didn’t matter to her that my teenage boys had innocently grabbed one too many. Her’s matched the set of luggage we had.
Sometimes what we think we see turns out to not be what we saw at all. I am reminded of a friend that told me she had seen another friend of mine out with a man that wasn’t her husband at a resteraunt in town. I knew that she was in the hospital after having surgery and unless she took time from her hospital stay to have dinner with a strange man the day before that it wasn’t her. Oh the damage that could have been done had I not known and corrected the “gossip” that was about to spread.
I was watching a 48 hours mystery a couple of night ago and it was about a young woman that had disappeared. The police suspected her boyfriend of 3 years of murdering her though the body had never been found. What was interesting is that once they started digging into this man’s background they found out that he was not who he said he was, that he had been married several times, that he had been in jail several times…..none of which any of her family or friends or apparently she suspected. He had forged birth certificates and gotten new i.d’s and started a new life across the country. And I wondered how could you live with someone for 3 years and not suspect anything was amiss.
And I can say that among the internet dating sites , even the “safe ones” there are a lot of predators, or at least liars out there. More than one woman has been fooled on that front. And hopefully lived to tell about it. I don’t know of any close calls personally but there were certainly some men along the way that on the phone and paper turned out to be a lot different in person.
Sometimes, things just aren’t as they seem no matter how much it appears to be so. Proceed in life..with caution.
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