CINDY MADDERA

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MISSED CONNECTIONS

Saturday morning, I pulled myself out of bed to do my usual hunting and gathering routine. I’m going to confess that this is kind of a big deal. The usual Saturday morning routine has been disrupted in some way ever since the beginning of the new year. Some of the disruption has been entirely out of my control. Weather/illness/refrigerator delivery snafus are out of my control, but me just being too sleepy and tired on a Saturday morning is entirely within my power of control. This time, I got myself out of bed and out the door before 7:30 AM. I had a nice little breakfast and resumed my writing relationship with my Fortune Cookie journal, abandoning my other story for now until I know more about France, Germany and Nazis. Then I headed out for hunting and gathering.

I was in the produce section of Trader Joe’s and was reaching up to grab a bag of mixed greens, when the woman standing next to me said “Oh! You have a list! That’s so smart. I’ve already put three things in my cart that I didn’t even come in here for.” I laughed and said “I’m not so sure how smart it is or just crazy that I have a list.” Then I explained the meal planning food control situation I had going on with that list. We laughed and then parted ways. Except, we kept bumping into each other in different sections of the store. Each time, we’d have a brief conversation before moving on. At one point, our conversation went on long enough to cause a traffic jam in the freezer section. We both ended up returning our shopping carts at the same time and the woman laughed and said “we even finished at the same time!” The two of us laughed and said our goodbyes as we moved off to our own vehicles. I watched her car pull out of it’s parking spot and for a minute, I thought about running over to her car to properly introduce myself and maybe even exchange numbers.

Now, I have serious regrets about not getting her name and number.

It’s just that she was so fun and personable and likeable. I thought “This is a woman that I could be friends with! We could meet for coffee and or drinks.” I bet she’d be really into going to Camp Wildling. I feel like she’d fit right in with all of us. I feel like every Saturday morning from now on, I’ll be distractedly shopping in Trader Joe’s while searching for this woman. Then I have to find a way to approach her without being creepy or stalkery. Someone recently posted a romantic missed connection thing in Twitter and the people in Twitterverse found out who the missing parties were and got that couple together. I need something like this, but less romantic and more ‘let’s be friends’. So…I’m looking for a woman with light brown skin who was in the Kansas City, MO Trader Joe’s on Saturday morning January 29th around 8:30 AM. She was wearing a beautiful white, red floral print, head scarf. She mentioned her five year old, so I know she has at least one kid. She drove a white toyota four door thing, like maybe a Camry(?).

Lady, if you read this, I swear I am not a psychopath. I just want to be friends.