Hello, happy shopper in aisle No. 9. I see you down there, glancing guiltily this way and then that, terrified by the idea that someone you know might see you buying dye for your beard. It’s mortifying, I know. Especially since you’re a woman.

In a city this size, it’s hard to get away with shopping for your personal needs. The very second you pick up a spray for private odors or an embarrassing itch, a dozen friends are there pointing and laughing.

So I’m told, anyway.

Fortunately for me, I was only there to get coffee. A quick in and out, I thought, but it never happens that way. Whenever I go to the grocery store, it’s like a Blue Light Special on story ideas.

I was accosted before I was even inside the store.

“You know what you should do a story on?” the burly man said. “People who drain gray water out their windows. There’s all kinds of that going on downtown.”

I won’t lie to you. I had no idea what gray water was. It has an ominous, spy-movie ring to it, like “black money” or “red November” or “goldfinger.”

My friend explained it as I inched my way toward the doors in my quest for coffee. Turns out Alec Baldwin isn’t planning to star in a thriller called “Gray Water” any time soon.

“It’s leftover household water. You know, the stuff from you bathtub, your sink or your washing machine.”

Apparently downtown, many folks have gotten into the habit of snaking their drain pipes through a window so their delicious used water spills out onto the back lawn or sidewalk. Why just this afternoon, the news tipster told me, he had come across one apartment house where gray water was flowing down from an upper floor, a semi-toxic waterfall.

So I made myself a mental note: Gray water. Watch for that downtown. Don’t drink and/or bathe in it. Possible fodder for a column or bestselling novel.

I moved on.

Inside the store, I came across a clerk who was recovering from an encounter with a nasty customer. An old woman had gone up one side of him and down the other in a dispute over what can and cannot be purchased with food stamps.

The clerk had politely explained the company policy to her. The woman, growing surlier by the second, wasn’t buying it. She screamed at the clerk for 15 minutes and demanded to see his boss. His boss’s boss. By golly, she wanted to convene a tribunal right on the spot and see that the young man got a public paddling. The line grew long behind her as she continued to express her wrath.

Scary stuff. I made a mental note. Mean old ladies. Is there anything more frightening when they get to yelling at you? It’s like a shriveling embodiment of all the women you’ve displeased over the course of your troublesome existence. Your momma, your sixth-grade teacher, every bitter ex-girlfriend you’ve ever had.

There is no defending yourself against the wrath of a raging old lady. Sass one and you’ll end up with a twisted ear or a cap in the rear-end, depending on which side of town she comes from.

I continued on.

Deeper into the store, over near the toothpaste and cat food, I ran into another fellow I know, a retired cop. We shook hands. Then he asked why the hell he had seen my byline on a story about restrooms and which ones transsexuals should be allowed to use.

“Is there really nothing more important going on in Augusta?” he demanded of me. “That they can waste time creating laws that can’t be enforced?”

So I made another mental note: Remember the transsexuals. Tossed in there with the oozing gray water and the shrieking old woman, things were starting to look like a bad ’80s movie.

You wonder why I’m cranky.

I marched on. By and large, I enjoy going to the grocery store. You run into people you know in your professional life, and you see them in an entirely new context. The pedantic English teacher, who always wears bow ties and is forever speaking in breathless tones about the wonders of Keats, is there in a ratty denim coat and a dirty baseball cap. He’s hauling three bottles of wine, a 12-pack of toilet paper and a flounder. You wonder what kind of night he has lined up, and then decide you don’t want to know.

That smoking hottie from the gym is there, but now she’s frumpy and toting five screaming children through the cereal aisle.

Your boss is there, browsing forlornly through the TV dinners, and suddenly he seems entirely mortal.

The big beat cop is there agonizing over hair conditioners — this one is a volumizer but that one has wheat protein — and all at once he’s not nearly as fearsome as he is on the streets.

The most dashing character in the world is whittled down to mere human level by the prosaic routine of the grocery store. It levels the playing field. I don’t care how macho you are on the outside, if you’re there picking up fingernail polish, yogurt and low-fat anything for the wife, you are one of us. The humility is free.

Fun stuff. But not on this day. I came for one thing and all I wanted to do was grab it and go.

“Hey,” said a fellow who spotted me near canned meats. “You know what you should do a story on? The gazebo.”

I could have just agreed and went on my way. Instead, I asked him what a gazebo had to do with anything.

“Have you seen the gazebo in Kennedy Park lately? It’s a mess. The last time they painted it was when there was a rumor going around that B.B. King was coming to Lewiston.”

He thought about it, scratching his head and staring blankly at a can of Spam.

“Or maybe it was Oprah Winfrey. Either way, it was years ago. B.B. King and Oprah never came, and the gazebo hasn’t been painted since.”

To recap: Gray water, transsexuals, the frightening elderly and a crumbling gazebo. I tell you, if Quentin Tarantino had been in the grocery store that day instead of me, he’d already have a blockbuster in the theaters.

I got out of the grocery store eventually. I made it all the way through the express checkout, out the doors and across the parking lot without another story idea flung at me like rice at a wedding. I made it home, locked the door, turned off the ringer on my phone. All’s well that ends well.

Unfortunately, I forgot the coffee.