James Joyce: “Maaaaaam, oh, maaaaaaaaa…”
Albert Camus (to a concerned Big Lots manager): “Lost maman in home goods today. Or maybe it was yesterday.”
George Orwell: “Mom, The Party is holding me at checkout for thoughtcrime (throwing hangers at store security cameras).”
Herman Melville (to Costco employee): “When we find her, please don’t tell mom I said she’s my white whale.”
Emily Dickinson (scribbled on an old receipt and hidden under a dressing room bench):
Mom—ma—
Mother, come—quick, or I’ll be found—
by no one.
Ernest Hemingway: “I’m scared. That’s all.”
Malcolm Gladwell (to a shopper with lots of time to kill in Marshalls): “On the surface, I’m lost. Separated from my mother, plain and simple. But what if I told you this fateful event began way earlier than twenty minutes ago when I got sidetracked by a runaway bouncy ball. No, it begins before me or, likely, you. This story started one hundred years ago with an obscure Slovenian retail design consultant from Ljubljana and the disdain he held for his overbearing mother.”
Elizabeth Bishop (convincing herself she’s fine with losing her mom): “The art of losing isn’t hard to master.”
Ian Fleming (on Nordstrom Rack intercom): “M, this isn’t a secure line. If you’re looking for your phone, I slipped it in a display of men’s dress shoes out of spite for forcing me to come here. You won’t find it without me.”
J. D. Salinger (to Kohls employee): “If you want to hear about the last place I saw my mom, you’ll probably wanna know where I was born, about my lousy childhood, and how many of your dressing rooms have ‘fuck you’ etched into the walls.”
Joan Didion (to sketchy teens behind a strip mall, predicting the fall of brick-and-mortar shopping centers): “The center cannot hold.”
Sophocles (to Burlington cashier): “No, I couldn’t find my mother, but I did see the person I want to marry someday.”
Samuel Beckett (to himself after waiting ten minutes outside the dressing room while his mom tries on jeans): “I’ll wait. But I’ve waited long enough. For what? Her call. Then I’ll wait for her call.”
James Joyce (cont.): “…aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaam.”