Target Corp. Chronicles

My brother's wife (Hallie...of fried cranberry sauce fame) has sent me on a series of misadventures to Target stores throughout the greater Phoenix area in search of a glow-in-the-dark-sings-songs-when-you-touch-it form of Pooh Bear. Okay, so I went to two different Targets, but neither of them had it. I thought I was being efficient with my website print-out, but the whole effort turned out to be a waste of time. I settled for some kind of piggy bank that keeps track of how much money is in there so you don't have to count it. But that's not really the point of this story.

The point of this story is that all this Target exposure brought back memories of my favorite Target - the one in San Bruno, CA with the escalator thingys for your carts. I'm about to admit something slightly (possibly very) embarrassing, but often I would sneak away from my desk at the nearby Gap HQ building and have lunch at the Target food section. Mostly Taco Bell. Actually, it was always Taco Bell. There were several benefits to these outings:

1. They charged less and gave you more meat per taco than the Taco Bell that was right across the street from work.
2. There was almost no chance that I would run into someone from work (we introverts need our mental processing time).
3. There was always a group of elderly Italian men talking smack to each other sitting in the corner.

The last reason was the real attraction. I started going because of the aforementioned taco value proposition, but made a habit of this excursion when I was studying for the GMAT and needed a place I knew I wouldn't be disturbed in order to squeeze in some math problems during my lunch break. I kept coming back just to see if the group of old guys was still there, and it always was. From what I remember they talked about horse racing a lot, and I admired their camaraderie as much as their raunchy jokes (they also drank a lot of coffee, which I appreciated too). I'll be lucky to have friends like that to joke around with at the Target food court when I'm their age...if they were on Facebook they'd be trout-slapping themselves silly. They're sort of heroes to me.