Cart tricks

Last week – or, six days ago, to be precise – I was, once again, walking to the gym listening to a hockey podcast, like so many times before, when I suddenly noticed something out of the ordinary in front of me.

There, parked by the side of the bike lane, was a shopping cart.

A #%#€”& shopping cart, I said to myself, under my breath, naturally.

I looked around to see if I could find the culprit, but it was as hopeless as my efforts to memorize the face of a seagull shitting on me. And yet, when that happens – it’s happened to me twice in the last ten years – I always look up, wave my fist, and point a the bird with my finger, as a warning.

Not this one.

Now, I’m not the most orderly man in the world. I lose things, my desk is a mess – but not as bad as the rest of the room – and I can walk by a pile of clothes, mine or the kids’, many times before picking them up. I can live with a little bit of chaos, more so than Wife which is why she does some things more often than I.

But outside the house, I believe in at least some version of the broken windows theory. The original theory states that “monitoring and maintaining urban environments in a well-ordered condition may stop further vandalism as well as an escalation into more serious crime”.

I believe that letting one shopping cart stay in our bike lane will lead to more shopping carts there, and then people in the shopping carts, and then their families, all in the shopping carts, and we just can’t have that.

Last summer, I rode my bike to another mall, a little farther away, and I took a shortcut through a parking lot of an apartment building. There, behind the building, next to their trash cans, were a dozen shopping carts. It was like a shopping cart hangout, a place where the really cool carts hang out.

But of course, somebody had left them there. Or, many somebodies.

I didn’t understand it then, and I still don’t get it. Why would anyone take a cart from the store and walk it home? And the people that do this, do they use the same one for all their shopping, or do they take new ones each time?

Whatever they do, though, they shouldn’t leave it where I’m walking to the gym.

It was a split second decision, and I went through a couple of different options, but in the end, I grabbed the handle, and started pushing the cart away from our neighborhood. I thought that maybe I’d walk to the tunnel, and leave it there, or maybe take it to the other side of the tunnel, the other side of the tracks, where I suspected it had come from.

Then I realized that I’d be doing the same stupid thing that somebody else had done: dumping an empty shopping cart. And it didn’t matter that it hadn’t been me who had walked out of a store, out to the parking lot, past all the cars, out of the lot and onto the street, and then kept on walking.

No, I’m better than that. I would return it to the store, I said to myself.

“Gotta take this … somebody … oh, people,” is what I said out loud because a man walking a dog was about to pass me going the other way.

He looked away.

I realized I was just a man pushing an empty shopping cart in the snow. A man with a stubble wearing a funny looking hat – pushing an empty shopping cart in the darkness.

I also realized that WILLYs, the store the cart was from, was too far away. And I never shop there anyway.

In my head, I now quickly constructed a new plan, and the new plan was to take the cart to the police station nearby. Surely the police would take care of an empty shopping cart.

I came to the tunnel, and I didn’t leave the cart there, and I kept pushing, and I made a right turn, so I didn’t just dump it on the other side, either.

“Sir,” I said to the imaginary policeman in my head, “sir, I found this cart over at the bike lane on the other side of the tunnel, and I think it’s best if you take care of it now. I think we both know we don’t want empty shopping carts lying around like that.”

“You know the empty shopping carts theory, right,” I told him.

Then I saw a real police car coming towards me, so I straightened my back, and smiled a little.

“Empty shopping carts theory,” I mumbled, as the car drove past me.

Now I was a little angry. The police sees a man pushing an empty shopping cart, a man with a stubble wearing a funny looking hat pushing an empty shopping cart in the darkness, no less, and they keep on driving?

“Oh man, you cops,” I said, now determined to take that short detour via the police station, before going to the gym.

I started to walk a little faster, and I gritted my teeth, and in my head, I saw myself walking into the police station, and straight into the lost and found and just dumping – dumping! – the cart there.

“There! I found it!” I told the gray-haired, overweight, imaginary man behind the imaginary counter.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” he said.

“Fight crime,” I said. “Remember the empty shopping carts theory? Which Police Academy did you go to? Let me guess? Police Academy 3,” I added, in my head, but out loud, I chuckled, then made a helicopter sound like Michael Winslow did in the movie.

I took a left and I could see the police station. The building was dark, there weren’t even any cars outside. I kept pushing the cart, but then made a change of plans. I decided that the lost and found department was probably closed for the day, anyway. It was 8 pm, after all. And since there weren’t any cars outside, I couldn’t tell anyone about the cart.

Another hundred meters later, right across the street from the police station, I stopped. I looked at the police station one more time, and then left the cart in the snow next to the bike stands.

Today, as I walked home from the train station, I saw that the cart is no longer where I left it.

It’s on the other side of the bike lane. At least for now.

Here.

Let's talk! Write a comment below.