Another amazing installment from Clay
So April does have Internet access this week but she wanted me to post a few more times while she is away. So, here is installment number two of “Clay’s Life Pre-April”:
My Dad was a preacher and a teacher so “goin’ it cheap” has been a way of life for me for as long as I can remember. Among the things that were “normal” in our house when I was growing up was the phrase “it has already been spent” when depositing a check in the bank. Other normal events in our house: hanging our sopping wet laundry in the basement in front of a fan because our dryer didn’t work and the spin cycle on our washer was broken; carpooling everywhere because our car was usually in the shop; and running to the local Aldi store.
Dad loved Aldi much the way I do today. It saves a lot of money. But Dad really, really loved Aldi. It was a dark, dirty, scary place when I was a kid and if you didn’t really love it, you never, ever went in. I think we were in there three or four times a week.
Our Aldi used to identify the content of the aisles in the store by pinning poster boards onto large foam core panels and suspending from the ceiling by fishing wire. These were at the end of each aisle and low enough for a gangly, unusually tall nine year old to reach and knock about. The poster boards were attached to the foam core with push pins, the kind that are about one inch long with a small colored ball on the end. And because my brother and I could reach the signs, we would grab a couple of push pins to, usually, poke each other in the butt. Sometimes the arm, but mostly the butt.
He and I once took bottle rocket sticks, small rubber bands, and a collection of those push pins and made home made darts that we liked to throw at each other. I’m pretty sure he stuck one in my head once. Playing “darts” usually capped a fun filled day of using rolled up newspapers to beat the crap out of each other. A game that we called “Beat Each Other to a Pulp.” Anyway, back to Aldis.
The poking of each other’s butts was cool, but after a while, even that wears thin so we started to poke other items in the store: spaghetti boxes, cereal boxes, bags of flour, meat. Anything that we could stick, we stuck. It was fun. Vicious, terrible fun.
My brother once stuck a bag of sugar and we watched the sugar trickle out a little bit at a time until there was a thin layer on the shelf. That was cool, but I was not to be outdone. We happened to be by the two litters of soda at the time and…yep, I stuck ‘er right in. It was cool, it took a little force, but it went right in and just stayed there. I showed Jody and we snickered a little bit.
Then, well, I decided that I needed an object lesson in fluid dynamics. I took the pin out. And the soda immediately started spewing onto me and the shelf, sort of like I was in the titanic just after the iceberg hit. “Captain!! We’ve sprung a leak and we’re going down!” I put my finger on the hole and tried to slow it down but it was too much pressure and if I stayed there too long, Dad would notice and he would kill me. I mean it, I would be dead now.
It just so happened that Dad was at the checkout when all of this was occurring so I pushed the two liter toward the back of the shelf, turned it so that the hole faced away from the aisle, and got the heck out of there. I was the model son during the packing of the boxes and the long ride home.
I don’t know who found that leaking bottle and the mess I made but I’ve winced more than a hundred times in my adult life at that experience. I don’t really even like going to Aldi anymore because of it. I’m convinced that I’m going to run face to face with some old dude in an Aldi apron. We will mumble something about “pardon me” and “no, no my fault” and do the step-the-same-way dance. We will chuckle and he will stop and look at my face and say, “Hey, do I know you?” “No, no…impossible” I’ll say. But he will stare into my eyes and it will slowly dawn on him that I was the kid. The kid that stickified the enter center aisle of his beloved Aldi. The kid that caused him to spend months wiping syrup goo off the shelving and the floors and all of the other boxes of groceries that the soda lovingly coated with sugary glee. The kid that gave him the worst mess in his 45 years as an Aldi stock boy. THAT kid.
And he will rage. Oh, he will rage. He will throw his arms in the air in order to bring them down on my head and pull a muscle in his back or break a hip. And I will have to help him in the only way I know how. I will place him on a shelf, shove him to the back, turn him around so that he is facing away from the aisle and get the heck out of there.
It will happen. Just like that.
Need a Chicken Doctor?
Contact 
If our kids ever do this, I’m blaming you. Wait, have they done this?
Oh! I forgot to tell you about Levi sitting on the bing cherries in the grocery cart and they dripped all over the store. The kids and I thought somebody had a bloody nose and we were trying to figure out where it was coming from….dur. It looked like we killed someone and hid their body under the cart.
Okay – I’m sorry – I’m a West Coast girl.
What’s Aldi?
It’s a really cheap grocery store. Check them out here: http://www.aldi.com
Ah, kids just don’t know how to have fun anymore!! But, I know your kids would NEVER do any of these things.
I never saw an Aldi store until a few years after we moved to Wichita. It’s a great place to save on groceries, although it can still be a very dark and scary place. It would also be a wonderful place for wannabe novelists to go and study people so they can create interesting characters to populate their novels. Aldi is full of interesting characters. Gangly nine-year-old boys armed with stick pins ain’t nothin’.
BTW, have you been rummaging in my fridge? It’s either you or my mother-in-law. Someone leaves terrible sticky messes behind in there. Please try to be more careful. I’d also appreciate it if you would stop leaving unwrapped, cut onions in there.
I hope your kids read this.
Oh, Clay, this is bad.
But as a grownup I tossed a bag of sugar into my cart (aisle 3) and went merrily and s-l-o-w-l-y through the store buying everything (and piling it on top of the sugar) and listening to the manager on the loudspeaker politely asking shoppers to please PLEASE check your carriage for a leaking sugar bag, we will get you another one, PLEASE shoppers for the love of all that is not sticky PLEASE check…
And I’m thinking, wow, whoever has that bag is being wicked out of it. What is her problem, just check!!
Well, in aisle 14 I realized who that oblivious shopper actually was.
I felt so bad. There was a trail of sugar through pretty much the ENTIRE store.
And it was my fault. AND I was judgmental in my heart about the other stupid shoppers.
Sigh.
You are just as hillarious as April. Gosh I love Aldi’s as much as I love laughing at your Aldi’s story. Aldi’s is the reason we can afford the long commute for my hubby, Aldi’s is the reason we can afford to give a big party to my boys for their birthdays, and Aldi’s is the reason I’m eating a BIG HANDFUL of cashews, right now, cause they were so cheap I couldn’t say no!
So that was YOU? Dalodgefrickinfrackin whippersnappers stickin pins in all the dadblasted dingdonged soda bottles. I figured it was someone just like you who would grow up to be a no account dadblamed arkeetect or a mass murderer.
Sounds like a movie!
This is why I am adamant in the opinion that all boys need a father to parent them. Only fathers have been boys at one time. They understand sons in a way that mothers simply can not and parent them accordingly. Sometimes we moms, often against our better judgment, need to defer to our husbands in decisions about the boys because those fathers KNOW what it’s like to be there. It’s hard for me to do but with five sons sometimes I gotta say, “Dear- YOU handle this one.”
the two of you definitely have the gift of telling a great, hilarious, tale!
Hahahahaaa… you were such a boy! My grandson gets away with all kinds of stuff because I just laugh and say… oh, you are such a boy. After raising three daughters and dealing with all those hormones a little messy boy is refreshing.
Good points all around. Truly apercpiated.
Clay, you hooligan! We love it.
Yes, April, we love your hubs — but we love you too!!! And the two of you are even greater than the sum of its parts…ahh…you know what I mean!
I am not sure I’ve ever heard of Aldi’s. Here in NJ we have Shop Rite. But it’s not dark and scary.
Ok way too funny. I have such a great picture painted for me in my mind. thanks for the late night chuckle.
At Kroger, I broke a bag of fish fry coating all over the self-check out machine. This is AFTER I fell INTO a display of canned goods and knocked them all over the floor. On the way out of the store, I tripped over the rug.
The next day, I was back at Kroger (because I always forget something), and they were TAKING APART the self-scanner I’d used. They had a big shop vac at the ready, so I can only assume they were cleaning up my spilled fish-fry (there were little piles of cornmeal everywhere). I was mildly mortified.
Of course…all of this was accidental. You were just naughty! Funny, but naughty.
I’ve been known to patronize Aldi, though in Western Kentucky, it’s very clean and well lit, if only slightly shabby.
Clay! You really need to start your own blog. Hilarious!
My daddy grew up with one older sister and three younger brothers. Oh, the tales he tells. He only had two girls…but now he has four grandsons. Sometimes we catch him telling these stories to his grandsons, our sons, and we just hold our collective breath and pray they won’t reenact any of it. But, my oldest has BMX bikes and such. It can’t get much scarier than that, can it? I guess it can.
This was great. As a kid i remember poking and pushing the tops of pre-made cake boxes so the icing would stick to the and goof it up, till Mom caught me. I still think of that when I see a a cake in a box like that.
Man! You write well. So funny and clever and boyish.
You were very naughty.
Clay, I take great comfort in the fact that you turned out reasonably normal, or at least employable.
I will now look more charitably on my two hooligans:)
LOVE your tales Clay. Boys are so much different from girls in their overt agressiveness. But girls have their own ways thats for sure. My daughter just got married this past March to a Rice Univ. professor and she has a 5 yr. old boy from her first marriage. Her first husband is the antithesis to the prof. But the poor prof HASNT A CLUE as to how to approach this boy situation. He thinks when the wee one is wanting to get the toad out of the hole that he should “just observe”. And it wasnt as if the wee one was torturing. I showed him how to pour a bucket of water AROUND the hole to help the frog/toad come out. This was just tooooooo much for the prof. OBSERVE ONLY. He has forgotten that he too was a boy once.
I giggled when I passed the soda aisle this morning during my shopping trip
Thanks for that!
Typical preacher’s kid! I cringe to think of what you pulled during worship services!
Clay – you are just as funny as your wife. You should be a guest blogger more often. Thanks for the story. I could totally imagined it as you were telling it. My boys always like mssing around in our Aldi’s too. Climbing up on stuff, knocking stuff over – I guess it’s my punishment for making them shop with me. Thank the good Lord our Aldi’s doesn’t use the push-pin in cardboard displays anymore or they would definitely be poking each other as you did.
Hey Clay,
Funny blog! Aldi, dark and scary?? The one I go to is bright and clean. I guess they have come a long way.
Charlotte
Shamefull. That’s all. We’ve all been there. I just don’t want my kids telling me until I retire to another state.
*guffaw*
I love the Aldi’s!
And your story is too funny, I’ll never look at a pushpin the same way again.
I believe we have an Aldi store, but I think it is on the side of town where I dare not venture alone or after dark. I’ll have to check it out. During the daytime. And, when my husband is willing to tag along.
PS – great story.
Too funny! but it makes me even more thankful that I have only one boy, and 3 girls instead of the 4 boys I used to wish for long ago.
Clay, I love your Aldi story. I can totally picture my two kids doing that exact thing. They are 10 and 8. Although, I don’t know if I’ll ever get them into an Aldi again.
I’ve been to Aldi 3 times. Once several years ago. I felt like I was in a parallel universe. It looked like when they film a movie in a grocery store – no recognizeable brands in the background. I felt creeped out and didn’t go back for years until I read April’s getting out of debt stories and was inspired to try it again. We are just getting started with Dave Ramsey and are recent FPU attendees so I thought Hey,it could save us some $$.
I went on a scouting mission at a new Aldi they just built near us. It was clean and bright and they had lemons for .15 each! I saw a bunch of stuff I thought I’d like to try. So I talked my family into going along with me on a shopping trip. We “unlocked” our cart with a quarter…weird, but OK, got halfway down the first aisle when a bus load of people from I don’t know where showed up. They swarmed the aisle swearing like crazy grabbing food like maniacs. One guy had a shirt on that said “Mutha F***a” on it. My kids just stood there and stared with their mouths open. My daughter whispers to me, Mom, I don’t think I like this place. we should go, it’s not safe here. Then the swarm of people moved on.
I won’t have much luck getting my kids to go there again. I would still shop there, but next time I’ll bring shopping bags. I didn’t know you had to bring your own? And I’d make sure I had a quarter on me.
The place is definitely quirky.
I think I like Cosco better.
That is fantastic. Truely, that sounds like something I would do. (Or have done as the case may be…)
So funny. I’m glad my kids haven’t done this…at least if they have, I don’t know. Ignorance is bliss sometimes.
-FringeGirl
Great story! I can’t believe all the insidious little stuff we used to do as kids, too. Like taking a straight pin and carving my name (read: I wasn’t too bright)on the side of the car. Yeah. The painted side. Why I had a straight pin out by the car..maybe I ran around with straight pins..I don’t know, but I should’ve just carved my brothers name and ran….
Clay, you’re scaring me! We are expecting a great grandson in July. He will be the first boy in our family and I don’t know what to expect. Lord, help us!!!
That is so funny! I wish that was the worst thing I had done as a child!
that was too good ,how is it possible that both of ya’ll can be so hilarious ,must be the water
You are so funny! Oh my. Thank goodness I have girls – the worst thing they do at the grocery is ask for candy and pretend that a sack of sugar is a baby. LOVE THIS BLOG!