Do you have any “dreams” that you often talk about realizing some day?  You know, those kinds of things that you are convinced you’d just love to do, at least one time?  I had a fabulous opportunity to help a friend of mine realize one of those dreams earlier this month and we had a great time doing it.  In the end, she gets to check off one of the things on her bucket list now…

I had just moved to a new place and needed a bunch of things…furniture and the other usual bits and pieces that one needs in any new home, like toilet paper holders.  I have to admit this is the first of many many moves to a new place where there are no toilet paper holders anywhere to be found.  I’ve never seen that.  Who takes their toilet paper holders with them?  Oh well, always a new experience…makes life more interesting.  In any case, after drawing up my shopping list, I figured out that I’d need to do at least seven different stores in order to find everything.  Now I can handle a store or two and, as long as I know where to find what I’m looking for, I know I’ll survive the experience.  But when we’re starting to look at having to do more than two stores, that’s when I begin to have strange reactions to the task.  I had already begun to think about how I could live without a kitchen table…

Fortunately for me though, I have good friends who love to shop and know the entire inventory of every store in the city.  I enlisted my good friend Sonya for this round of shopping.  She was the perfect person for the task since not only does she satisfy the above-mentioned criteria, she also has this uncanny ability to recall aisle numbers and where exactly on the shelf you’ll find the product you’re looking for.  Now we’re ready to go and despite the fact that I know I’m in good hands with my shopping partner, I am still quietly going through it in my mind and trying to figure out how to reduce the number of stores we will have to frequent to complete the task.  Sonya on the other hand is simply delighted at the prospect of being able to spend an entire day in the stores (I’m sure that’s how she was planning the day while I was trying to figure out how we could get it all done in an hour!).  We’re on the road now and suddenly a brilliant idea finally comes to mind…we could go to Ikea and surely find absolutely everything there including curtains and toilet paper holders, albeit in strange Swedish dimensions.  A one-stop shop, how fabulous is that?  Even if the dimensions are a little askew and the pictorial instructions are yet another exercise in being in the present moment and at peace with the universe, I am willing to take on that challenge just to avoid a more extensive shopping experience.  But…there was only one little glitch in that brilliant idea…  Sonya will shop anywhere BUT Ikea.  She can’t stand that store and refuses to go in.  I need to find an enticing way to get her consent…  In her defense though, I have to admit that Ikea’s strategy of herding the entire store through a pre-designed footpath so that when we get lost, the entire store is lost together in the same aisle…well, it is somewhat of an experience one would rather avoid.  The reward does come when you finally emerge and you can go home.  But now, how will I convince her of my brilliant idea?

A few miles down the road, it hits me!  Since the day I met Sonya, there is one line that she blurts out on a rather regular basis out of the blue.  She will suddenly say, “Start the car!!!!!!!”.  She just loves that Ikea commercial and has mentioned several times that she’d love to be the lady doing that commercial.  So now I have brilliant bait.  I suggest to her that if we go to Ikea, I will end up with a shopping cart full of stuff and a bill…in other words, all the props and the location to actually film the commercial of her dreams.  At long last, she will get to be that lady and have her minute of fame.  That idea puts a big smile on her face and we’ve got a deal.  We’re on our way to Ikea!!  She still had a reaction the instant we set foot in the door and the entire time we were being herded through the store, following the Ikea popcorn trail like everyone else, of course as far as she was concerned every idiot in the city was there that day.  But we persisted and made it to the end of the trail.  She did very well because she only growled at 17 people and all but two of those were spared from insults.  We now had a huge cart full of items.  We were set to shoot her dream commercial.  The day was a success all around and Sonya gets to put a check mark on her bucket list.

Check out how happy Sonya is as she finally gets to make her ”getaway” from Ikea…

Anyone else have any fun and crazy dreams you’d like to realize?

Kharim 

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