Аннотация: MMMDIV. Penguin and Italian sunglasses. A humorous drawing of a piece of the distant past. - June 7, 2024.
Penguin and Italian sunglasses. A humorous drawing of a piece of the distant past.
When visiting the mega mall (near the M-4 Don highway) I was making most of the planned purchases.
However, on the way back, I was doing stops near a relatively small super market (store) to buy some goods.
At some point, a pretty young girl turned up in this super market, to whom I was happy to make small gifts (sweets, juice packs, and the like).
She impressed me with her beautiful face and small graceful figure. It was quite natural for me to build the most daring projections into the future. For sure, she has a lot of positive qualities. And she can make a decent person happy.
This store, as I could see, began to fill with some strange energy.
This energy manifested itself, at first, in the appearance of a micro-kiosk selling branded mayonnaise (from a certain manufacturer) on several square meters (near the cash registers).
In the supermarket, mayonnaise was represented by several brands (mostly of a low price category), and this micro-kiosk had almost no real customers.
A ridiculous-looking guy was trying to trade in this micro-kiosk. As a rule, I am not particularly slender, and I treat the fullness of other people philosophically. But this guy - his physique - attracted attention. He was two or three times as fat as an ordinary overweight man. Plus a specific head and an unusual face. The grotesque character, the penguin-man, came to mind when looking at him.
To the physique was added the deliberate carelessness of the appearance of a man who lives on a percentage of the sales of goods that are not in demand: "I don't care about unimportant questions."
At first, this character behaved quietly: he stood quietly behind his counter waiting for customers.
Apparently, my more or less regular gifts to a pretty girl opened his eyes to an existing opportunity: it turns out that he can not only be present in the store, but also to do signs of attention towards the opposite sex.
I paid almost no attention to him (I went to the circus once or twice in early childhood, and I did not like these visits), so I did not attach importance to some new phenomenon in the behavior of the penguin man: when I approached (with purchases) to the cash register, at which a pretty girl was sitting, he was going out from his micro-kiosk and came closer to this cash register. Naturally, this did not prevent me from giving something (as gifts) and exchanging a few phrases with the girl.
It seemed to me that both his approaches to the cash register and his fluttering, fuss, bustle near the door for customers (when I left the store) were the usual Brownian motion of one of the persons related to the store.
My inattention led to an unpleasant incident: on one of the holidays (New Year?) I added a bottle of Tsimlyanskoe sparkling wine to my purchases and tried to give this bottle to a pretty girl as a gift.
Suddenly she declared that she did not want to accept this gift.
With more care and with a more complete understanding of the situation, I would, more or less calmly, return this bottle back to the shelf and forget about the incident.
But in a situation of surprise, I tried to insist on a gift and left the bottle next to the girl, who made an unpleasant face and said that she did not need this bottle.
The understanding of the situation came when I once again parked my car in front of this super market. At that moment, a strange-looking mechanism drove right up to the entrance.
I had a brand-new, straight from the factory, silver five-door hatchback with a euro-2 engine, about 65 hp, (in very good, even excellent condition), worth about one hundred and fifty thousand rubles (at prices of that period). - The strange mechanism cost, in my opinion, about ten thousand rubles.
By some efforts, this strange mechanism was brought into a mobile state, and it had a possibility to overcome a certain number of kilometers (meters).
A penguin man got out of the mechanism and entered the super market.
It was then that it began to dawn on me that the penguin man had not just learned from me the sound idea that it was allowed to pay attention to representatives of the opposite sex, but that he had arranged something like an undeclared competition with me.
Was the penguin man the (real) owner of the strange mechanism? Did he have a driver's license? Did he take out insurance, did he undergo maintenance?
Some saleswomen lived in (former) dormitories located next to the supermarket, which were several hundred meters away. It was possible to cover this distance more or less safely without a driver's license, without insurance, and without undergoing maintenance. Where did this mechanism come from? I don't know. Once, in a remote wastepoint in this area, I found an abandoned car of about the same kind - someone rolled it into this wasteland and dumped it there for some reason. It was gradually dismantled, but it stood in this place for a long time - for some reason it was not dragged away for a scrap point.
Both at that time and now, I appreciate the efforts of the penguin man as a kind of feat. The seller, who lives on a percentage of the sale of goods that are not in demand, somehow managed to bring an unusable car into a movable state and managed to pose as a boyfriend-a motorist, owner of a car, who is ready to give the girl a ride home.
In my opinion, the penguin man most effectively used his strategic advantage: being constantly near the cash registers.
Devotion and fervor can melt many women's hearts. With such persistence on his part, it could be assumed that he had more than serious intentions. But I don't know for sure.
Well, if he really staged an unannounced competition with me, then I really didn't have any similar desire.
Even if I had shown fervor, dedication and perseverance to the required extent, what would I have achieved: the invitation her to my house, the memories of a pleasant evening that turned into nighttime?
Would the blurred outlines of a cute creature remain in my memory, who decided to show me a reciprocal sign of attention - after several weeks or months of continuous "persecution", "stalking"?
Even now, the blurred outlines of the penguin man are easier to recall up than the appearance of this girl: the girl was prettier, and the penguin man was more colorful, more unusual.
I saw (from a distance) this girl a couple of times in the area of the (former) dormitories I mentioned earlier. (There was also a bank branch where local inhabitants could pay for utilities).
Several years have passed.
In some other store, in another area, I was packing the purchased goods in a bag. There was a young woman standing next to me, whom I was not paying attention to.
The young woman took off her sunglasses - very similar to those glasses in which Italian film actresses were photographed - and looked at me questioningly. What did her look mean?
Since we didn't know each other, I didn't pay attention to that look. But after a few seconds, or minutes, it dawned on me that this was the same girl, concerning which the penguin man had entered into an undeclared competition with me.
What did her question mean? I do not know that.
I mentally paid tribute to her Italian sunglasses.
I could only to mentally shrug my shoulders.
June 07, 2024 12:13
Translation from Russian into English: June 7, 2024 21:40
Владимир Владимирович Залесский " и итальянские очки. Юмористическая зарисовка кусочка далекого прошлого ".
{ 3533. Пингвин и итальянские очки. Юмористическая зарисовка кусочка далекого прошлого. - 7 июня 2024 г.
MMMDIV. Penguin and Italian sunglasses. A humorous drawing of a piece of the distant past. - June 7, 2024.
Vladimir Zalessky Internet-bibliotheca. Интернет-библиотека Владимира Залесского. }