HOSTILE TERRITORY: I pulled into the local Home Depot this afternoon and was weaving my way through the parking lot looking for a space. Someone was loading a van with lumber and had an aisle half blocked, leaving just enough room for one car to pass. I was coming up the aisle and a guy in a big SUV was coming the other way. I was closer to the blockade, so the SUV-man held back in a gentlemanly fashion. Or so I thought.

Just after passing the lumber loaders, I saw a space to my left, so I jammed the wheel and turned in. There was another space just past me, and the big SUV started clumsily maneuvering into it. As I got out of my car, I heard some shouting from that SUV, something about “taking my space” followed with some good old-fashioned eschatological invective. Given the tone of the gentleman’s voice, I decided it was best not to look back.

I got into the Depot and sought out the safety of the plumbing aisle. It was kind of crowded, so my new friend couldn’t pick me out too easily. However, I sensed that the longer I stayed, the more vulnerable I was to a rather unpleasant encounter with a frustrated, high-testosterone man on a hot summer afternoon. I was looking for a washer for the neck connection on my sink, which is pretty leaky these days. But there were too many; who knew which one would work. You shouldn’t go into Home Depot unless you know what you’re doing. And if I decided to buy some washers and stand in one of those slow lines behind guys and burly women with boxes of tile and rolls of insulation and sheets of drywall, I’d be a sitting duck for a meeting with my SUV-owning friend. So I decided after 5 minutes to sneak out the entrance way. I wondered what sort of revenge he had planned for me for making him walk an extra 10 feet.

I was relieved when I arrived at my car to find all the windows intact and none of the tires slashed. There weren’t any huge scratches to the car body either. No, all that my friend did to express his angst was to put a lumber cart behind my rear bumper. Phew. I put the cart off to the side, started my machine up, and got the heck out of there.

Honestly, I didn’t want to spite the guy. I didn’t know he wanted that particular space. He didn’t have any blinkers on. When the same thing happens to me, I let it go. I figure that when you see a parking spot that you’d like but someone else gets there first, them’s the breaks. But I guess that when you’re a big guy in a big SUV at Home Depot and you see a skinny guy in a Corolla get to your spot first, well, things just seem dreadfully wrong with the universe.

There was one cool aspect to the incident, however. During my short time in the store, I heard Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down” playing on the PA system. Yea, it’s funny how sometimes you hear just the right song at the right time in the right place. Almost as if life were a movie or something.

P.S. I did finally resolve the leaky faucet neck problem; went back to the Depot (a different one!) and got some teflon packing rope. Voila! Now, if I could just find a fix for the “aggressive, frustrated suburban male in big SUV” syndrome.