Oh, let me tell you what happened at Wal-Mart!

I called my Sainted Southern Mother this morning for a chit-chat. We shot the breeze for a while before she said, "Oh, let me tell you what happened at Wal-Mart. It's a blog story!"

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Last Sunday after church, my SSM told my Good Ol' Boy Daddy she was popping out to Wal-Mart and asked if he needed anything. "I'd sure like some merlot," he replied. My SSM doesn't drink, and her alcohol purchases are probably limited to a bottle of rum for seven years' worth of Christmas rum balls and what was supposed to be a virgin pina colada at a restaurant in Asheville once (my sister Jill witnessed that one).

I'm pretty sure my Pops was not expecting her to bring him a bottle of wine, but she decided to surprise him.

The Super Wal-Mart in Shallotte is the size of a city block, and the wine section is discreetly tucked away in the back corner. On her way in, my SSM ran into "every Baptist and Methodist in Shallotte talking about the sermon." And every one of them stopped her to hug her neck and talk about the sermon.

Miss Popularity made her way, little by little, to the wine section. She looked around to make sure nobody was looking and grabbed the first bottle labeled "merlot" she saw.

And she stuck it under her coat. Yes, she stuck it under her coat so the church people wouldn't see it. No, it did not occur to her that security cameras probably zoomed in on her as a potential shoplifter.

My dear SSM is recovering from hip surgery, so she took a shopping cart to lean on as she walked through the massive store to buy two things, but she shed the cumbersome object and concentrated on just getting the wine and getting out of there as quickly as possible. With her left hand, she secreted the wine stash and with her right, she used the heck out of her cane while her pocketbook dangled from her elbow "like a little old lady's."

She got a quarter of the way back to the registers when she looked down and saw that the neck of the bottle was sticking out of her coat. So she fished a Kleenex out of her pocketbook and covered it before making a beeline to the closest register to the door, paying for her contraband and sneaking it through the parking lot.

She proudly presented my Pops with a bottle of Wal-Mart merlot and told him the story. "Good lord, Birdie! You could have been arrested!" he exclaimed. The thought never occurred to her.

"Mama!" I said after catching my breath from laughing about her coming close to showing up in the court docket of my hometown weekly, "Those Baptists and Methodists were probably making small talk so you would leave and they could buy their wine!"

"Your sister said the same thing," she replied.