The lost boys

Poor Monkey had a five-minute trauma yesterday.

We had gone into Marshall's looking for socks for him, and were trundling around the shop/store picking up a dead cute pair of red-pink Converse low-tops for Mabel (not yet - next size up, but she might get to wear them to school next year and drop paint on them) and looking at this and that, since Mabel was sitting fairly contentedly in the trolley/cart so I didn't have to hot-foot it out. This may have had something to do with the baby in a box she had picked up in the toy department; I told her she wasn't buying it, but she could hold it till we finished up.

(See how I'm helpfully giving you the Irish and US vocabulary here? I don't want to alienate my Irish readers by making them think I've gone over to the dark side of sidewalks and vacations altogether, but I don't want to confuse and puzzle my poor American readers with peculiar terms they use for other things. If you're from somewhere else, I'm afraid you'll just have to muddle through.)

Anyway, Monkey was being a super-secret spy or something, following on behind me, but hiding around a corner or in a clothes rack any time I looked around. He probably had a theme tune going in his head. (This is a reference to The Emperor's New Groove, but we're probably the only family who has watched it enough to get it. An under-appreciated Disney: I highly recommend it.) I'd watch for long enough to make sure he'd seen where I was, and then continue without him, apparently unconcerned.

Sadly, it bit him in the ass, so to speak. The cash registers had been hidden behind a high display of summer tchotchkes, and I waited for him to appear before turning Mabel around the corner into them. Of course, this being Marshall's, I had to wait a few minutes to get to pay. (Marshall's, if you're not familiar with it, is a discount retailer ike T.K. Maxx in Ireland, though this particular branch is fairly small - a big square space too full of rails and rails of clothes.) As Mabel prattled on about the baby and its accoutrements, and I made sure she wasn't ripping the packaging of this item we were about to not buy, I craned my neck to watch for Monkey's face to peer around a corner at us. It didn't happen, but I couldn't lose my place in the ever-increasing queue to go and check on him, and I reasoned that all he had to do was listen for Mabel's crystal-clear babbling to pinpoint us.

Just as the customer in front left and the cashier beckoned me forward, a red-faced Monkey pushed through the display and ran over to me. He wasn't crying, but something wasn't right, and as he reached me he started to hyperventilate and burst into tears. I buried his head in my mid-section and tried to comfort him while explaining that no, we weren't taking the doll; yes, we were taking the socks and the shoes; and swiping the swipe and punching the numbers. Transaction completed, we headed towards some chairs by the door and Monkey said, between sobs, "Sorry, Mummy. I got some snot on your t-shirt."

I sat and held him for a while as he calmed down, but he was clearly very shaken and had been quite panicked. Someone had noticed and asked if he was lost just as he spotted me, so I don't know how he would have dealt with interacting with a stranger at that point. We talked about how I would never, ever leave a shop without him, and what he should do if he was lost in the future (we have covered this in the past, but not recently, and it's never been a real possibility to him before), and Mabel annouced that if he gets lost again, she'll go and find him and bring him back. That's all I would need, I imagine.

(When I was four, I got lost in Dun Laoghaire shopping centre with Simon from up the road, who was a lofty five. He panicked and blubbed. I clearly remember sitting in the little back room with the nice security people, telling them our names, as they announced over the intercom that two small children had been found. Our mums, shopping together, who had probably been frantic with worry, came to get us. I was sanguine and practical about the whole thing, and felt a certain scorn for Simon for a long time afterwards. Until now, maybe.)

Then Monkey and Mabel and I went next door to Target and christened the new Starbucks there by getting the victim of the incident a chocolate milk and a slice of lemon cake for us all to share. When he laughed about the giant dripping cardboard ice-pop suspended from the ceiling, it was with the pure sunshiny joy of one who'd been given a second chance at life.