DISCONTINUED

It was a warm summer evening, fairy lights, champagne, hors d’oeuvres, lots of cool looking people.  The kind of party that makes you feel almost cool yourself. So you go up to a cute stranger and cheekily say, “Hey, I thought I was the soul of the seventies.”

He smiled, charmingly. “Actually I wasn’t even born yet.”

Errr. And there you have it.

I yelled at five kids in the supermarket yesterday. Luckily I live in Britain so the worst that could have happened is that I’d have been knifed. If I were in Texas I’d be shot so many times I’d look like cheesecloth. Oddly only one of the kids was  on a scooter, bearing down on me with the determined glare of a kamikaze pilot; the others were racing wildly through the aisles, maybe playing hide and seek or trip the old lady or some other fun kids’ game.

I yelled: “This is not a playground!” Of course everyone in the store who was frozen in fear, clutching to their shopping carts, must have been feeling exactly the same, But they all looked away. Not for the reason I was emotionally abusing children which was triggering their own abusive childhoods. But because this was Britain and I was calling attention to myself.

May I add, those children were not orphans. I spotted their parents in the vicinity considering the prices of canned tomatoes. But they didn’t seem to notice that their kids were terrorizing the store. I guess if they had, they might have said: “Hey, they’re kids. They do that all the time at home.” Yes, but this is not their home. It’s Waitrose’s home. And mine temporarily as I spend 175 pounds for what is little more than  an evening meal.

Still, I’m beginning to spot a theme here.

Recently I tried to reorder the perfume I had reluctantly turned to after my last favorite was discontinued. Only to be told it had been discontinued. Most of the shops, banks, post office, cleaners, on my shopping street have been discontinued and turned into a multitude of nail shops and Turkish barbers who give extraordinary haircuts. If that’s what everyone looks like in Turkey it’s a good reason to save the airfare and never see the Blue Mosque.

And the list goes on.

I can spout reams of poems and Shakespeare, the preamble to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, a good hunk of the Gettysburg address but I can’t remember to pick up some mayonnaise.   Which was the last item on a shopping list I left at home.

And it’s not just me. My husband is barely through the door of a restaurant before he is asking the staff  to turn down the music.

So inevitably the question is: are we becoming the cranky couple who live in a haunted house, collecting newspapers and stray cats and stealing poor little children’s baseballs that they’ve accidentally lobbed into the garden?

In other words, losing it.

They say an early sign is when your sense of direction begins to falter. Which doesn’t work for me since I never had one. I could always find my way to the supermarket and get back home safely…just as long as I wasn’t distracted by taking, what my husband suggests, is a short cut.

Another test. You could excuse anyone who has a problem naming the Prime Minister of the UK which is now becoming a temporary post. The President of the US is unfortunately unforgettable.

More worrying is, I can sustain the ability to read a whole newspaper article, even an entire book, which is a clear sign of age.

So I guess I am Soul of the Seventies: Al Jarreau, Bill Withers, The Eagles, Stevie, Elton…. I guess I could have worse company.

TURNING POINTS from Crowd-Writing

a book by Shelley Katz

Out Now