Saturday shopping

Zut alors, here I am late again posting! Guess what I did!

Did I hear someone say, "Go shopping with your mother?" We have a winner! Above is a picture of me shopping.

I was gone all afternoon. First we went to an estate sale on Lorfield in Snyder and next we went to an estate sale on Alberta Drive which is near the Boulevard Mall. Not Alberta Drive. Another street just like that. I cannot remember which one.

All I got at the estate sales was a kitchen timer. For a buck! It is the old-fashioned spring kind that does not take a battery and goes "ping." I want it for when I am baking bread.

One thing, at the estate sale where I was buying the timer, the line got really long. I waited it out because what the heck, my mother was with me and I was not going anywhere fast anyhow.

They had a checkout lady in training, was what the problem was. Someone was paying with a credit card. And there was lots of back-and-forth:

"OK, now you need to ask for the driver's license."

"Can I have your driver's license?"

"Now write down the information."

"What information?"

This went on and on. And I am standing there with this stupid kitchen timer. I should have set the timer for an hour, just to hear it go "Ping!"

Luckily my timer was just a dollar so I did not have to use a credit card. Oh, wait, I do not have a credit card anyway.

After that estate sale we stopped at the Salvation Army on Niagara Falls Boulevard so I could scour the vinyl. OK, I bought a dress too. And a skirt. And a tank top!

But the vinyl I found! I got "The Best of Leonard Pennario, Vol. 3" which, my brother George has snapped it up because yesterday he just got his record player up and playing. Miklos' Rozsa's "Spellbound" Concerto is on that record and George is a fan of Miklos Rozsa.

I also got an extra copy of "Rhapsody Under the Stars."

And "Concertos Under the Stars." You cannot have too many of those!

All these Pennario albums! Luck was with me today. That is for sure.

Then I got "Horowitz on Television." There is this great picture of the weaselly little Horowitz sitting there with this gigantic TV camera focused on him. It looks huge and inhuman, like an X-ray machine or something. See and believe!


Also I got Glenn Gould playing Beethoven. And Claudio Arrau playing Beethoven's "Eroica" Variations which I love and I play myself. I had the Arrau performances on CD already but I prefer vinyl.

Here is the last part of the "Eroica" Variations, the part I love. It is magical! It is not Arrau but it is Emil Gilels. Pennario liked Gilels and I do too.

So that was nice, three albums by Pennario, three by lesser pianists but you know what, I still enjoy them now and then. Also I got an album by Ahmad Jamal. I have a weakness for Ahmad Jamal and this one had him playing Duke Ellington's "Squeeze Me" which is a song that I love.

As I was standing at the checkout loaded down with these albums wouldn't you know, the woman in front of me goes through this big show of emptying out all her change on the counter, looking for a nickel or whatever.

This was as bad as the estate sale!

I know I am not at Lord and Taylor but still I am thinking: Can we once, just once, buy something without incident?

Not on a Saturday in my life, I will tell you that right now.