Everything is so much more complicated when one is on crutches. For example, I went to buy eggs today. As I hobbled into the grocery store, I realized that I hadn’t thought out how I would bring the eggs to the cash. So I took a plastic bag from the front, thinking that I would be able to attach it tightly enough to one of my crutches to hobble my way back to the front.

Yeah, right. I won’t go into the details, but no, it didn’t work. Plus, someone had to put the eggs at the furthest possible point in the grocery store, so by the time I got there, I was a little out of breath (I was in a hurry and going as fast as I could).

Since I have been carrying around a messenger bag since the day I was condemned to use crutches, there seemed only one solution: to put the eggs in the messenger bag. But I didn’t want to be accused of stealing. So I stood there for a couple of minutes and when I finally spotted one of the employees, I smiled at him and motioned him over.

“Hi! I just wanted to tell you that I am going to put eggs in my bag to take them to the cash and pay for them.”

His response? He started laughing and told me that were a security guard accuse me of shoplifting eggs, he would vouch for my innocence.

So off I went, all the way back to the front, a little slower than before (I didn’t want to pay for scrambled eggs), thinking midway that the employee could have offered to take the eggs for me to the cash instead of me suffering from intense tachycardia at the thought of going to jail for something I never intended to do. But in the end, it was worth the look on the cashiers face. She watches me approaching and then stopping.

“Hi,” I smile at her, reaching for my bag.

Her face was a mixture of “What the heck?” and “Poor girl” with a dash of “Is she a psych ward escapee?”. I pulled the eggs out of my bag; at this point I should mention that I had already put them in the plastic bag, too.

“Returns are over there,” she said, pointing behind her.

Are you kidding me? I couldn’t help it – I started laughing. “No, I’m not here to return eggs” (seriously, do people even do that?). “I had to put them in my bag to carry them all the way here. I swear, I didn’t intend to steal them and I have nothing else in my bag.”

The poor girl had probably been working for awhile, because she just stood there blinking at me, totally lost. Thankfully, the client behind me had a sense of humor and started teasing me about pretending to have a sprained ankle, and the incident finished with me sitting in my car laughing for a good couple of minutes.

I’m about to head out again – let’s see if anything else happens to me.