The Parking Score Conundrum

Holy, you guys, I know I've been pretty MIA. I do have a lot to say, just no time to say it; or type it, as the case may be. To keep this blog alive with minimal life support, I am going to tell you all just a quick story for the day. You can thank Aunt Bev for this one because she says I have the weirdest things happen to me and the most awesome stories, so I should post this one.

Yesterday I was at Wal-Mart with my mom. We parked near Lawn and Garden and got out of the car only for me to turn around and look slightly to my left. There was a little red car taking up two precious parking spaces in the conundrum that is a Wal-Mart parking lot.

For those of you who don't know, this is why I keep sticky notes in my purse. I always want to write "parking fail" or "parking score: minus ten" on one and then slap it on the car, but never have. As I was standing there wondering why I carry the sticky notes but never use them, and pondering if I should do it this time, I got my answer.

As I was looking to my left, my mom was looking to the right and noticed our cousin Randy and my Great-Aunt Sarah, Randy's mom, coming down the parking lot. My eyes merged my mom's way as hers merged mine. Yep, you guessed it, they were the two-for offenders. If you knew Randy, the driver, this would explain a lot and you would not at all be shocked by this.

Just a quick story about Randy. Randy is an interesting in the odd way person, but a nice person. However, he is so interesting that Aunt Sarah calls him Ranny. He's in his late fifties and never left home, nor has he ever paid bills or rent, but he does work. He even dropped Aunt Sarah off at my grandma's funeral, but he left. His dad was my grandpap's brother, so they knew each other fairly well. He just didn't feel like hanging out with dead people, I guess. We still like him anyway. That's just simply Ranny.

Anyway, as my mom and I are trying not to laugh considering I had loudly explained how I was debating sticky noting the parking fail car, I decided to bite the bullet and run over to Aunt Sarah to say hi. Honestly, I hadn't seen her since my grandma's funeral, and had called her to go out to eat with us, but she didn't call back. She's in her late eighties and a lot of times she either listens to messages on her machine and doesn't write down what they were and forgets, or, my favorite, she just never bothers to listen to them or deal with them. Period. I love her.

A few things you have to understand about Aunt Sarah are that she is one of the kindest, sweetest people in the world. She has nothing bad to say about anyone or anything ever. I've never heard her say anything mean or sarcastic. I once spent three full days with this woman when we took her on a weekend trip and nothing. Literally the meanest thing she has ever said was regarding a guy who didn't treat me right. Her comment was "you just say hello and goodbye to those people." Yep, that's really as mean as she gets.

Two, she's hysterical without trying to be. I think this goes with the first part, because she's nice when she shouldn't be and tries to be oblivious. To compare her to a character you all may be familiar with, she is the Jamie Sullivan from A Walk to Remember of real life. There is not one thing to not like about Aunt Sarah. We knew when she didn't call us back that it wasn't because she hated us so much as she just did something silly. We knew we were going to get a chuckle out of her when we heard the story. We did.

Three, she is going a little senile, I think. But for goodness sake, she is in her late eighties and allowed. For as long as I can remember, Aunt Sarah has worn pantsuits. And as Betty White's character, Elka, would say on Hot In Cleveland, "when you're in your eighties you dress for the bathroom." I can appreciate it and have no issues whatsoever with the pantsuit aspect of her day wear. It's the senile part that concerns me.

You see, Aunt Sarah thinks she has matching pantsuits. She does not. Not a one. And if, by chance, she does, I have never seen one. The ones she does have are really close to matching, so close that it hurts, but yet they don't match, which ends up being so much funnier than if they just didn't match in the least. For instance, she had on a dark blue pair of pants with white flowers on them, and then a dark blue top on that was about two shades lighter than the pants, and had white hearts on it. The hearts and flowers were the same size and the colors were similar, but no dice.

I think the saddest thing about this is that Ranny never tells her this before she leaves the house. He never once says she doesn't match, because if he did, she would surely change. She is a well respected woman and it's in her nature. But we don't help matters any, because we always tend to see her after she's left the house and already at an adjoining event. By that time, we don't have the heart to tell her she doesn't match because then that's all she'll think about it and it will bother her and ruin her day. So basically what I'm saying is maybe her not matching is all our fault, and by our I mean everyone in her life, but not at all her fault. It's something to think about.

I'm afraid of what she will wear years down the road when she sadly passes and Ranny is in charge of attempting to make a match out of everything that doesn't match. Will he try to get something close? Will he figure he'll look dumber if he hits it close but not quite, so he'll just miss totally so that it looks intentional?

Aunt Bev also pointed out that last year on QVC, her favorite channel, they started selling pantsuits that didn't match claiming it was the new style. Aunt Bev changed the channel immediately, which is new for her because she's pretty up on the new fashions, but she knew this was a bunch of crap. She said about a week later they were selling them at clearance prices and then they seized selling them. She can't imagine why and she absolutely means that sarcastically.