Rear Ended

Today I was rear ended in the rear end by a rear end while taking a pee!

Okay, I'll admit that with that sentence I've taken some poetic phonetic license.

The opening statement and image would seem to imply that I was involved in a traffic accident, and that, while I was taking a leak.

Well ... not exactly.

I wasn't on a street when I was rear ended. I wasn't driving my truck when I was rear ended. I wasn't parked when I was rear ended.

I was "driving" a shopping cart through a busy thoroughfare that was actually the aisles of a supermarket.

I had stopped in front of a pyramid-stacked display of a certain kind of canned vegetables. One can of that particular vegetable was on my shopping list. At the same moment that I reached out to take one ...

I was suddenly bumped in the rear end. The force of the bump pushed me with an extended arm forward ... into the neatly stacked pyramid.

Can you say avalanche? Dozens of cans toppled, almost like a landslide, onto and off the table. The clatter of the cascading tin cans echoed as they hit the floor and rolled all over the central aisle.

I managed to turn around to see who or what had rear ended me. I had been rear ended in my own rear end by a rear end much, much larger than mine. I had been rear ended by the rear end of a woman with a very large rear end! She had stooped over, rear end in the air, instead of kneeling, to retrieve something from a bottom shelf.

The eyes of several customers and of the girls behind the cash registers were all looking in my direction. They were looking me, the cans rolling around on the floor and the remains of the collapsed display.

Suddenly "Rear End" wheeled her cart around me and shook her head. Then she said, "Why do people always try to take cans from the bottom of a stack?" She then disappeared into the next aisle.

I stood there, the center of attention, holding a single can of peas. It wasn't quite like the feeling one gets from a dream where they are naked in a crowded room, but it was a close second.

Uncomfortable and self-conscious of what had happened, I gathered up the rest of the items on my list and headed for the nearest register. I couldn't have gotten out of that store fast enough. (But, why? I didn't do anything wrong. Did I?)

Then there was a loud crash at the next register. She, with the devastating derriere, had tried to pass between a magazine rack and a display of Tic-Tacs. Something had to give. It was a matter of the classic scientific question: "What happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object?"

Behind her stood the next victim. The poor guy, in the wrong place at the wrong time, just happened to have moved into the line behind Boulder Buttocks. She was glaring at him and in front of everyone, indicting him.

So it was, that I was rear ended in the rear end by a rear end while taking a pee ... er, a can of peas!

This is in no way intended to slight those people who are rather larger in certain areas of their bodies than most of us. However, there are those who should be equipped 'back-up beepers.'

№ 1951