Baptism by ...

I baptised my car this past weekend. It’s around six months old, so I guess that it was time and all. I hadn’t planned things to happen quite the way they did, but who does? Coming home from lunch on Sunday, I decided to do the responsible thing and pop into the grocery store and pick up the week’s supplies. Since I had the car, I also bought some heavier items including a couple of bottles of wine. One of the bottles was a Santa Helena, a Chilean red that I quite like. The other – an Argentinean red – I must admit, I judged by the label alone – it was a colourful, stylised painting of two tango dancers – and I had no idea of its worth or taste.

The checkout line was brutally slow¹ and I breathed a sigh of relief when it was finally my turn. Bagging my own purchases, I hesitated when I got to the two wine bottles. Should I double bag? Should I only put one bottle per bag? Thinking over the situation – the bottles would i) be transferred from the cart to my car in a matter of seconds; ii) be transferred from my car to another cart in my parking garage; and finally iii) would be transferred from this second cart directly onto my kitchen counter – the wastage of so many plastic bags seemed unnecessary. I used one (Brazilian – I’m sure you can see where this is going) bag for both bottles.

After paying, I loaded my bags back into the cart and headed to the parking lot, opened the trunk of the car, and started transferring my purchases. Everything seemed to happen in slow (but incredibly quick at the same time) motion when I got to the wine. I mindlessly lifted the bag from the cart and in the half a second that the bag was between the cart and the car, the bottom of the bag split and the bottle of Argentinean red fell noiselessly to the concrete floor, smashing violently and breaking into dozens of pieces, dying both the floor and parts of my car’s bumper red. What to do, except carefully clean up the glass and slink quietly away, hoping that not too many people saw the poor foreigner trying to skimp on bags?

Things I am thankful for: i) that the bottle did not actually break on the car – that would have been sad; and ii) that the bottle did not break in the car – that would have stunk.

Lessons Learned: there is a reason why bag packers in Brazilian supermarkets doublebad single items. At least the Santa Helena survived!

¹ It took twenty-five minutes to process two (!!) clients in front of me.