Reckless Driving Incident

Today I was browsing the grocery aisles at Target when another woman shopper ran her cart right over the toes on my flip-fopped right foot. I was startled and it hurt like hell, and moreover I thought it was going to mess up my 20-minutes-old pedicure (OPI Cajun Shrimp).

The other woman was so upset that she might have hurt me that she frantically apologized over and over, and then in a flash of panic let slip out, "Can I kiss it?" But not in a creepy foot-fetish way (like that guy outside the Macy's offices in San Francisco who always used to accost us on our way up from the BART station talking about, "nice...pretty...toes..."). But in a total Jewish mom kind of way; I could just hear the words coming out of my own mom's mouth. After the foot pain subsided, I released my toes from my massaging hand, and told her, no, no, no, it's no problem, of course you didn't mean it, things happen.

Then she said, "Are you...are you Jewish?" Yes, I'm Jewish, "Are you the daughter of...?" Nope, wrong Jewish parents' daughter. But I knew the reason she'd been distracted enough to run over my foot was that she was fixed on me trying to discern whether I was this person she suspected I was. I had wondered why she'd been staring.

[Vastly oversimplified kicker:] In this town, people offer to kiss your foot after running it over with a shopping cart in Target. In the Target in Queens, they steal your full cart so they can use it themselves, and throw all of its contents, including your scarf and winter coat with a monthly MetroCard in the pocket, on the floor under the boys' underwear racks. OK, so maybe that only happened once, but it obviously scarred me.