Costco

Regret:  Emotional pain on account of something done or experienced in the past, with a wish that it had been different; a looking back with dissatisfaction or with longing.  

A few years ago I was in The Old City and my mother expressed a desire to go to Costco.  She was, of course, too thrifty to pay for her own membership, preferring to piggyback on mine whenever she needed to go which was totally fine with me.  Costco is a big warehouse club where the standard technique is to cruise most of the aisles to load up on whatever staples catch your eye.  The place is quite large so it can take an hour or so to do this.  Costco isn't a place to go to pick up a thing or two - the idea is to stock up on some staples.

Fair enough, except that my mother treated it like the corner market.  She personally touched, evaluated, and analyzed every %$!! item in that huge %$!! store, calculating whether or not she could save a few cents on an item over the price she'd pay at a normal grocery store.  I'm impatient as hell on my most patient days when I'm dealing with people who don't try my patience so you can imagine how my frustration burgeoned and grew, like the mushroom cloud unfurling over a nuclear detonation.  I behaved well although I'll say that I finally got so frustrated that I went outside and made a few phone calls, an action that phased my mother not one iota.  She continued to plow through the store in slow-motion, caught in an existential molasses that only she could see.

I've thought about that over the last year.  I haven't obsessed over it but I haven't been able to shake a lingering sense that I could have done better.  My mother didn't want to sit down with me and share stories of what it was like growing up during WWII - she wanted to get some deals at Costco.  It makes one think about how actions today lead to memories tomorrow.