Here I am again at BJ’s, the cut-rate Costco. Why come back after the other day’s purse skirmish? Need kale — yes, I’m admitting it, sue me. So I grab a snowbanked cart from the lot to use, even for one item, thinking that the checker would be less likely to ask me to open my small black bag and divulge.
My, there’s a lot of paper garbage in the cart: the usual store coupon-books — so primitive, they actually make you clip them — as well as one of my favorite racist coffee-table reads: “Long Island Fugitive Finder.”
Issues of Fugitive Finder appear monthly in giveaway bins at markets all over Wrong Island. I’ve long wondered who at the magazine selects the star on the cover, and why. Do smart-suited, razor-tongued editors vie for their favorites, as they do at “Vogue” or “Vanity Fair”? (Oh, Anna Wintour has a house not too far from this very BJ’s.)
In case you’re curious, it’s not always a black guy. Male and female Latins, Middle Easterners, and even the occasional none of the above appear: there’s some attempt at criminal diversity. And the choice doesn’t seem to be pegged on the nature of the accusation: a pot fiend or the fellow who stole “31 men’s shirts valued at $1266.90 from the Express Store located at 1460 Union Turnpike” (that’s $40.87 each) is just as likely to make the grade as your neighborhood serial rapist.
Wouldn’t a “Your Face Here” copy make a great birthday gift, especially mixed into the regular stacks in his or her own village or town? Surprise!
More stuff is blowing around in the cart. What are these official-looking papers?
No, I can’t believe it. Not one “Certificate of Live Birth,” but two, for different children of the same parents, and a “Certified Transcript of Birth” for yet a third. (I fuzzed the photo at the top intentionally, so you can’t read the names.) They look to be real copies, if you know what I mean, with all the necessary signatures and stamps.
Every shopper knows how easy it is to forget things in a shopping cart, especially with noisy kids and spouses in tow demanding constant attention. I bring the certificates into the store, of course, and watch the clerk’s eyes widen with disbelief. She tells me she’s going to look for the parents “in the system.” I wish her luck.
We all should be grateful, I suppose, that they didn’t leave the babies themselves in the cart, stuffed, as purportedly has happened before, in a … handbag.
Lady Bracknell: Prism! Come here, Prism! Prism! Where is that baby? Twenty-eight years ago, Prism, you left Lord Bracknell’s house, Number 104, Upper Grosvenor Street, in charge of a perambulator that contained a baby, of the male sex. You never returned. A few weeks later, though, through the elaborate investigations of the Metropolitan police, the perambulator was discovered at midnight, standing by itself in a remote corner of Bayswater. It contained the manuscript of a three-volume novel of more than usually revolting sentimentality. But the baby was not there! Prism! Where is that baby?
Miss Prism: Lady Bracknell, I admit with shame that I do not know. I only wish I did. The plain facts of the case are these. On the morning of the day you mention, a day that is for ever branded on my memory, I prepared as usual to take the baby out in its perambulator. I had also with me a somewhat old, but capacious handbag, in which I had intended to place the manuscript of a work of fiction that I had written during my few unoccupied hours. In a moment of mental abstraction, for which I never can forgive myself, I deposited the manuscript in the basinette, and placed the baby in the handbag.
Jack: But where did you deposit the handbag?
Miss Prism: Do not ask me, Mr. Worthing.
Jack: Miss Prism, this is a matter of no small importance to me. I insist on knowing where you deposited the handbag that contained that infant.
Miss Prism: I left it in the cloakroom of one of the larger railway stations in London.
Jack: What railway station?
Miss Prism: Victoria. The Brighton line.
Oops. Just saw that you tagged this with BOTH The Importance of Being Earnest AND Oscar Wilde. And I thought I was being SO CLEVER to suss out your meaning JUST from your dry last line!
You are always a clever, and constant, reader, Meredith, and I’m delighted.
Jeff, this was a powerful hit to the gut and heart. THANK you