The checkout line is long and barely moving. I shift impatiently, balancing my ten-items-or-less in my arms, and nearly drop the milk. But I catch it on my knee, and a dairy catastrophe is narrowly averted.
Express line? I think with scorn. More like the slow lane to Hell.
Suddenly my imagination takes over, and the man scanning items on the checkout line isn’t a teenager with bad skin; he’s The Devil, complete with horns and cloven hooves, and all of us waiting in line are hapless entrants to – you guessed it – Hell.
“Fire, Brimstone, Fire, Fire,” he intones in a bored voice as he scans each soul. “Brimstone, Purgatory, Firepit, Limbo-” He stares accusingly at a tiny old lady in a flower-print dress. “You’re ringing up as Limbo,” he snarls. “We did away with Limbo eons ago. Why aren’t you ringing up as Purgatory?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” she says timidly. “I’m terribly sorry.”
He lets out a loud, put-upon sigh and taps some more keys, and with a good deal of muttering and glowering, finally processes her through to Purgatory.
At last, I think. Now we’ll all get out of here.
But there’s another problem. “I’ve got a Saved Soul on line 8,” The Devil bellows as he scans the next customer. “Manager, please.”
Everyone in line groans. “Not again,” the man behind me in line complains. “This happens every time I’m in the express line. Why can’t we all just go straight to Hell?”
Why, indeed?
When I finally get through the line and lift the grocery bag into my arms, my daughter looks over at me and grumbles, “We were in that stupid line for twenty minutes! How do you stand it?”
“Oh, I just make the best of it,” I reply mildly, and shrug. “What else can you do?”
At times like these, a vivid imagination comes in handy. And having a rich fantasy life has served me well over the years.
As a child, I never minded being on my own. Why should I, when I had my make-believe world to keep me company?
The top of the next-door neighbor’s tall pine tree was no mere tree; it was the crow’s nest of a pirate ship, and once I climbed up there, I was Anne Bonny, fearlessly sailing the seven seas in search of treasure… at least until my mother called me in to dinner.
The sandbox became, not a sandbox, but an arid expanse of desert, and my Ken doll was Laurence of Arabia, trekking through the dunes in search of gold. Barbie was the princess he kidnapped (and soon wished he hadn’t, since all she did was complain about the cat poop and the sand in her tiny little shoes.)
And as for my Barbie and Midge and Ken dolls – well, coming up with dramas (and appropriate outfits) for the three of them occupied me for hours. When I needed an extra date for Midge (there was only one Ken), my brother’s GI Joe was pressed into service.
Never mind that the dolls’ two-seater car usually lost control at the end of every date and crashed at the bottom of the back-yard hill; they survived, and lived to go out to dinner, or a movie, again the next day.
Then there was the solitary pleasure to be had with a book. Although it looked like I was curled up in a chair, reading a book, I was actually riding in a covered wagon across the prairie with Laura Ingalls and her family, or climbing into the wardrobe after Lucy Pevensie to re-emerge in a snow-covered forest in Narnia, or playing a vicious game of hedgehog croquet with Alice and the Red Queen.
Now, as I stand in line, or wait on the end of a phone, or sit in the same room while Mr Oliver watches some boring thing on television, I’m usually somewhere else altogether. I might be engrossed in a book, or thinking about the logistics of a scene in my novel, or I might be just… thinking.
Is there really an express lane to hell? How on earth do they process all those souls? What if the scanner jams?
“You look like you’re a million miles away,” Mr Oliver remarks as he turns off the television a few minutes later.
I smile. “Just thinking how much I love you,” I say, and kiss him on the cheek. “What would you like for dinner? Fire, or brimstone?”
He stares at me blankly. “What?”
Oops. “Oh, nothing. Just thinking, that’s all.”
“I think you’ve been working too hard, darling. You deserve a night out. Let’s go somewhere nice for dinner.”
And the best part? I didn’t imagine that…
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