Banned From Crate & Barrel

…or maybe I should be.

Most of us think things we have the good manners not to say out loud. I tend to vocalize those thoughts more often than I should. Sometimes hilarity ensues. Sometimes it doesn’t.

It all started so innocently.

Himself and I were on the way to Intelligentsia to take a load off after running errands, and as we passed Crate & Barrel we decided to pop in and have a look at their dining tables. We have a nice, big table, and we really like it, but it’s in a room that is so tiny it’s challenging to seat more than the two of us. Essentially, if you want to gather at our dining table, you have to be either pencil thin or coated in butter. Preferably both.

Blaze is the only one who fits comfortably in the dining chairs next to the wall.

A lovely Crate & Barrel employee–I’ll call her Susan–showed us some tables and explained their various attributes and features. She was helpful but respected our space. No hard sell, which I truly appreciate. We thanked her and wandered on to another part of the store.

A little later she finished up with a customer close by and came over to check on us. We made some small talk about how comfy the furniture was and which pieces we fancied. Emboldened by our easy rapport, she volunteered a story to illustrate the cushiness of their comfy chairs:

“A lady came in one time with lots of shopping bags, and she sat down in this really comfortable chair and fell right asleep, with those bags on the floor all around her.” We laughed, so she continued: “After awhile we decided it was a little odd and we had to wake her up. We were actually kind of afraid that she might have died!”

Instead of smiling politely and saying something innocuous like, “Oh my!” “Isn’t that something?” or “Who could blame you?” I instead blurted out, “Wow! If she’d died in that chair, I bet we could have gotten a great discount on it!”

Susan’s happy, storytelling face fell, and she looked positively stricken. She took a step back, clearly convinced that she was making nice with a deranged woman. Somewhere a cricket cleared his throat for the solo.

“Carol!” Himself sort of half-scolded me and tried to usher me away.

“But she didn’t actually DIE,” I protested a little too loudly, my voice echoing through the furniture department. “She was just ASLEEP!” He tried to act put out with me, but he was laughing his ass off, his annoyance completely unconvincing.

A sputtered excuse me/gotta go/bye now, and Susan scrammed, leaving behind one of those little “Susan” shaped figures in the air just like in the cartoons when a character dashes away.

“I CAN NEVER SHOW MY FACE IN CRATE & BARREL AGAIN!” I howled as we headed down the stairs, shoppers on two floors glancing our way and then quickly pretending we weren’t there.

There’s something about a good laugh that stirs up the giddy in me and makes everything funny. It’s probably more of an intoxicant than alcohol. I think I’m funny, but others just give me an uneasy look that says they really hope I’ll go away soon. Just like you do when some happy drunk wanders up and tries to make conversation. It’s the look that was on our coffeemeister’s face in Intelligentsia five minutes later when I started cracking wise about making my own change from the tip jar. Himself shooed me away from the counter and sent me to look for seats before things could get any more embarrassing.

(I plead that there is a practical aspect to my whacked thinking. Once a colleague returned from the police station after her stolen car was recovered. They found that the car was filled with dozens of purses, none of which belonged to her. So my question was, “Do any of the purses match any of your shoes?” She didn’t find my line of thinking nearly as helpful as I did.)

If we’d been stopped by police on the way home for erratic driving on the freeway, I’m not sure we could have explained to their satisfaction why we were laughing so hard as to be a menace to others on the road. A breathalizer would have shown only coffee in our systems, so we’d have no doubt been hauled off to the psych ward for observation.

Now I’m thinking that out of sheer guilt I should return to Crate & Barrel and buy a table and chairs and that I should buy them only from Susan. She clearly earned her commission. I’m just sorry that she’ll never again feel free to tell the sleeping shopping-bag lady story. Or maybe she will, and she’ll even include the part about the crazy woman willing to go to disturbing lengths for a bargain.

Poor Himself. It’s so very hard to take me out in public.