At the Grocery
This morning I went to the grocery store and at 9am there was exactly one staffed checkout lane open. No line. I had a bunch of coupons and a larger-than-normal order for me – about 15 items – so I thought, “Oh, cool! It’ll be like old times. Before self-scan changed things.”
The cashier said good morning.
Then came: “Hello! How are you?” A bright smiling greeting from a woman standing in the bagging area. The store hires adults with disabilities to bag groceries.
“I’m great! How are you?”
“Fine, thank you! Paper or plastic?”
I unloaded the items from my cart — bananas, avocados, celery, yogurt — and as the cashier scanned and streamed the groceries onward, the bagger looked over to me brightly again: “Hello, how are you?”
“I’m great! How are you?”
“Fine, thank you!” she said. “Do you like this yogurt?” She held it up.
“Well, I buy it for my wife.”
Then to the cashier: “Cynthia! He buys it for his wife, Cynthia! He buys this yogurt for his wife!”
She evidently found this delightful.
I smiled. Inwardly, I think I sort of smirked a little: Yogurt! The height of romance!
On my way home I felt into that interaction and replayed the dialog as I remembered it. Eventually I realized: Wait a second! I’d missed something important. I’m buying something I can’t eat due to a food allergy for someone I care for, who likes it. It’ll be there on the shelf in a shared refrigerator in a shared kitchen in a few minutes. There are likewise things Mary buys that she doesn’t eat. Things I like. She brings them home for me.
I kept feeling into what all this means…in particular how the woman bagging my groceries grasped the importance of something that I’d somehow missed. She saw and felt the sweetness in a sequence of actions precisely where I’d gone numb and robotic: “Oh, right. I have a coupon for that yogurt.”
“Cynthia! He buys it for his wife, Cynthia! He buys this yogurt for his wife!”
Looking back now, perhaps the strangest thing about all this was, in the moment those words were spoken, that 32oz yogurt started to change from a “product” into something else entirely: It became food.
At the same time, although it took a while, I slowly started to wake up.
But at first on my way home, I had indulged in ruminations about what I’d tagged in my mind as the “terrible poignancy” of the life of this person at the grocery. Maybe I’ll work it into an essay somehow, I thought.
Seriously.
I get lost sometimes. Daily, it seems. I never know who is going to help me find my way.
And I think we probably all have special needs.