Judgements We Pass While Picking Up the Milk, the Eggs, the Bread.
a search for life in the grocery store.
tired Dad, uptight Mama, and Baby Boy; the future germaphobe.
i’m storming into the grocery store.
i’ve too much to do this weekend,
and I’ve given half of Saturday to Friday night.
an affluent family,
seemingly affluent,
enters the store ahead of me.
they stand in the middle of the grocery cart dock.
they’ve commandeered a cart for a shopper with a child,
the child’s seat part of the cart, designed to be a racecar.
Momma hands Dad a fistful of disinfectant wipes.
Dad goes to work.
he furiously wipes down the cart.
any surface with any possibility of contaminating Baby Boy with germs must be dealt with in absolution and with impunity.
“don’t forget to wipe the wheels.”
Momma gestures to the make-believe steering wheels on the race car part of the cart.
“hold Mommy’s hand,” she says to Baby Boy.
my eyes wander to kiddo.
he’s five or six, something like that.
twenty years from now this kid could be doing his thousandth rip off the dirty water gravity bong he’s had for years.
this kid,
twenty years from now,
might be on his five hundredth hangover,
or his ninetieth one-night stand.
i think about my mother.
she used to wipe the cart too.
i look at Momma there with Dad and Baby Boy.
if only my mother knew back then,
if only Momma knew now.
we,
the germaphobes,
often have the highest chance of rolling in the mud.
“all done,” Dad says.
“great let’s go.”
and then they did.
old man and his old man brother.
they shop together,
in the way,
standing in the middle of the aisle.
one with a cane,
the other, smelling like an ashtray,
Cane, the older of the two, has his ass hanging out of these raggedy sweatpants.
not a care.
maybe he lost it somewhere on the long road to the store.
dead eyes and the stiff limp tell the tale.
Ashtray helps him grab the groceries.
they yell at each other over little inconveniences.
Ashtray, long and thin, with his beady eyes darting back and forth.
after the checkout line,
i saw Cane and Ashtray loading into a beat-up pickup,
parked in the handicapped spot.
Cane yells at Ashtray one more time before the continued long road.
“grab this for me, would ya?!”
Ashtray obliges. Cane hikes his ragged sweatpants up, hiding his flabby ass and crack.
it would slip out again, surely.
godspeed, Cane and Ashtray.
see you on the long road.
an aside, regarding self-checkout and the defense of the human spirit.
i can no longer sit in silence on this.
it started with the self-checkout section.
one day, we will look up from the dirt under the heel of the robots,
knowing that we began to lick the metal boot in the self-checkout line.
these bastards at the mega corps don’t want us talking to each other anymore.
this writer views self-checkout as detrimental to the human spirit.
if the corporations eventually decide to stop paying fair wages to the worker and rid the stores of
cashiers altogether,
know that the end times are no longer near,
rather, present.
it is in our very souls.
this thing at risk.
we were kids once,
shy,
unsocialized,
unburdened by our fellow man’s idiosyncratic and beautifully idiotic ways.
Mom took us to the store.
we’d beg for snacks that we’d come to realize were probably going to give us cancer one day,
God, i’d kill for a Cosmic Brownie.
when Mom was done shopping,
she’d take us to the cashier,
and make us exchange pleasantries.
“hi.”
“how are you?”
“i’m good.”
“thank you.”
“have a nice day.”
we did it through clenched baby teeth.
the flood gates were opened.
from then on,
humanity became verbally accessible to us.
the kids learn to tap early enough these days,
and will spend the rest of their lives tapping.
self-checkout is the poison in the ground water.
“how many bags did you use today?”
tap for the answer.
that’s what the screen asks.
it doesn’t know the weather,
or about the game.
it cannot give you an opinion on how busy it is,
and it will never bother to ask about your day.
reject it.
or at least slip a Snickers into the bag without paying for it.
amen.
saw a colleague as i was pushing my cart of unreasonably priced groceries back to my car.
my father used to tell me,
beg me,
“never let yourself be hungry. If you are hungry, buy food. I don’t care how much it is, buy it and don’t be hungry.”
my father,
an immigrant from the Philippines turned US taxpayer,
grew up poorer than poor,
went hungry often,
and was adamant that no son of his would starve.
and so,
i might complain,
but to honor that,
i will pay the price and moan about groceries on this page.
my father also used to say:
“please never start smoking.”
this is more relevant at this juncture.
headache.
God,
where did the day go?
why are the groceries so expensive?
am i gonna make it to next month?
am i gonna make it at all?
stress. stress. stress.
i am several people’s passerby as i make my way to the car.
skinny white guy ahead.
rail thin, wiry.
Beanpole wore skinny, black jeans; an oversized black sweatshirt, and a sheisty, most notably.
Beanpole carried himself like he had lived on corners around English Ave. and Vine City.
A Bluff-born Beanpole.
we were in Midtown Atlanta,
and so i doubted this read of him.
you know the type.
if you don’t,
you just haven’t lived in those parts of your cities, wherever you are.
he froze in his tracks.
pat the front jean pockets,
double pat the right front just in case,
pat the two back pockets,
check the sweatshirt pockets,
“shit,” i heard him think.
despite most of his face being covered by his sheisty,
i knew those pats well,
and i could see the look in his eyes despite being a length away.
i kept walking as he turned around and made his way back to his car.
as i passed,
my suspicions were confirmed as i saw him pull his forgotten nicotine vape out of the car and take a long drag before heading towards the store.
colleague, the Beanpole.
fellow addict and (occasional) street poser brother-in-arms.
i’m sure,
as sure and certain as i am that i miss smoking,
that your father begged you to not start smoking,
and,
that you too are about to overpay for groceries.
so much to do today,
and here i am writing all this to you now.
and just as well,
if you see me in the grocery store,
maybe i’ll end up on your page,
and you onto mine.
always return your shopping cart,
TCB
