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I'm just not going back to that drugstore where they think I'm a shoplifter.

At first I thought my husband was the suspect. We tend to go around together, and we were both there when the drugstore's public address system started blasting accusations.

My husband doesn't look any more like a shoplifter than I do, but I was an actual customer. I was looking for a particular brand of lip balm - a kind not many stores carry. Being almost 68, I'm even more sensitive to dry lips than when I was younger and will go to a store just to get the lip balm. (I rationalize the cost by remembering that I cut my own hair.)

I was completely surprised by the public address system giving a warning just as some stores say "Welcome" or something like that. The warning was not a general one about shoplifting. I guess they know that mostly everybody considers it a bad idea. The voice from overhead was addressing a shoplifter perusing a certain part of the store.

The floor was empty except for my husband and me, so I was horrified to realize that they must have thought he was a shoplifter. While waiting for me, he was walking around the store, probably picking up objects and looking at them. Of course, he would put each item back before moving on, but maybe they thought he was warming up to keep something.

By that time I had found my lip balm, so I grabbed it and rushed to the checkout. Quickly I paid a nice young man and motioned to my husband, some distance away, that I was leaving. Standing outside, waiting for him to catch up, I wondered if they thought we were some kind of team of shoplifters.

Probably nobody had ever wondered that about us before. Certainly we are considered eccentric. (After all, we are both retired English professors.) We must seem respectable if not boring, though. Were we attracting attention because we were not in a hurry like most people? The drugstore is in a rather upscale shopping center, so maybe my haircut made us both suspects.

Whatever had been going on, we returned to the same store the next time I ran out of lip balm. That time I knew where it was, but I wanted to look around at nail polish first. Knowing how jumpy the management must be about shoplifting, I kept both hands clasped behind my back as I strolled the aisles. That time, when the voice from the ceiling barked its warning, it identified the shoplifter as being in the cosmetics section. I was the only one there. I rushed over to the lip balm rack and grabbed two pots of it so I would not have to return anytime soon.

The young man who checked me out was as nice as the previous time and offered me a "favored customer's card." Did some camera set off the warnings about a shoplifter, without a human being activating anything? Was the perpetual warning why the store seemed not to have any customers but us?

I was not always this paranoid. The condition progressed in me at about the same time that I became two inches shorter. I was my full 5'6" when I did my doctoral work. Often I would stay in the university library so long that I forgot about one of the books I was carrying belonging to the library.

As I started to walk out, a buzzer would go off. Immediately a work/study student would appear with a form for me to fill out. I was supposed to write an explanation of why I had tried to walk out with the book. The form would be sent to my dean.

I knew him from church, and he obviously found me bewildering. Each time I filled out the form, I would write a long, rambling explanation designed to make him think I was downright weird. Even after all these years, I enjoy imagining a whole file of my forms somewhere in the dean's office. Probably some younger person serves as dean now and just knows that the folder was marked "Save."

It is also reassuring to look at the youthful photo on my university I.D., something I was supposed to return just before graduating. Instead, I slipped it out as a souvenir.

- Pat Gardner

Pat Gardner, a retired academic, lives with her husband and their half-spaniel dog Baggins. She enjoys meeting outrageous people in places like grocery stores.