Visit To The Grocery Store
And just like that, it happens.
The grinding heat of recent weeks was with us up until Friday. That morning the air felt different, and by dusk, it was noticeably cooler and breezier. I took a little stroll before dark and had to don a light jacket. When I arose yesterday morning, the coolness had intensified a notch. I went out into the back yard and stood beneath the maple tree, looking up through the branches at the curling leaves, throwing a shade for at least a little while longer. On the trunk of the maple I noticed a daddy longlegs picking his way along the bark “Better find yourself someplace warm,” I told him.
And then came this morning, with its air as cool as a pastor’s hand, and eastern skies like a brush fire seen from a plane high above. One traveling hummingbird stopped by, a female, and took a long series of drinks from the front feeder. The songbirds, who have been vacationing somewhere cooler and wetter, returned in force today. Goldfinches, cardinals, orioles, titmice, nuthatches, with blue jays and doves and sparrows and house wrens mixed in, they mobbed the feeders but especially the birdbaths. At one point there were so many birds jostling for position in the front bath, it looked as if the concrete dish itself was going to levitate.
And then in the afternoon it happened. It rained. For the first time in weeks and weeks, it rained, hard and steady. And when it finally stopped, the air was different, and magic had been worked, and Someone had pulled the tablecloth out from under all the trees and rocks and animals, leaving them tottering but standing, and the gleaming surface of autumn was there beneath it all. Fall came in, late but absolute, and it is wondrous.
We needed a few things for the week and decided to go to the grocery store, so off we went, down the mountain and into town and over there to the obstacle course parking lot and a bearded giant smiled at me while he returned his shopping cart to the holding area next to where we parked. Across the lot — unscorching and unshimmering at long last! — and to the entrance, where two elderly men sat in the shade, laughing with friends as they tried to solicit donations to a local charity. One of them was saying, “…and she ain’t got a tooth in her head, but she’ll eat corn on the cob every Sunday even if it harelips the governor….”
Grab a cart and swing around the corner, headed to the PRO-duce section, passing the chairs where elderly men sometimes sit and gossip while waiting for their women, never moving their heads, talking like Edward G. Robinson out of the corners of their mouths, and I want to join them and sit for a while but there are no vacant chairs, so on down the perimeter of the store with my wife’s little hand touching the small of my back.
They’ve rearranged most of the store and the older customers have been up in arms about it for weeks, and they have a valid point: it’s difficult to find things, and doesn’t that runty little assistant manager with the horseshoe scar on his scalp understand how a body just naturally goes towards what it knows? But he doesn’t care, no, because he just lives to push around the high school boys who stock the shelves and sack the groceries, and it’s swell to be able to carve out a little fiefdom when you’ve got the tools and the opportunity, because it’s nice work if you can get it.
And of course they’re out of my favorite hot dog chili, and my wife doesn’t want to risk getting the weird off-brand with a Revolutionary War-era piper on the label, so we get a big can of regular Texas chili, and when we get to the end of the aisle, there it is. A family reunion right at the endcap and they’ve got shopping carts piled in like bumper cars at the fair, and they’re a-laughing and a-guffawing with gusto, but they’re also looking right at us as we stand there, and none of them twitches a finger to move, so I turn us around and we head back up the long way, me cursing them under my breath because two or three of ’em looked like they could whip me, and what in blue blazes makes these people do this every single time in every single store we frequent? My wife’s little hand stays steady back there, and we move on to the next aisle.
We pass a little lady complaining about the overpowering scent of laundry detergent in that aisle —“Smells like a dang PER-fume factory in here!” — and find what we need and then on past the meat section, where I cannot resist gaping at the prices. I simply cannot believe that a pound of hamburger meat costs that much, but I resist saying so out loud in order to spare my wife the embarrassment or the laughter I gave her the last time I passed comment on what I saw as an exorbitant price…I had looked at an item some weeks ago and when I saw how much it cost, I tossed it back on the shelf and said, much louder than I realized, “I don’t think so.” My wife broke up laughing and said that I sounded like every grumpy old man she’d ever seen in a store, and that made it okay, because I think I’ve earned my Grumpy Old Man card.
Scoot around to the last aisle where we need something, fetch it, cart it, and head towards the registers, but first we have to make it past the Samples Guy. He’s a pudgy old Yankee who prepares and hands out the free samples of various items on sale, like cheese cubes or smoked sausage or hummus on crackers or seasonal fruit wedges. He announces the samples and his mutable location within the store via a phone connected to the overhead sound system, and he’s infatuated with the sound of his own voice and he annoys me because among other things he invariably interrupts a song on the sound system that I really like, say, The Little River Band’s “Reminiscing,” or Al Stewart’s “Year of the Cat.” Yes, he interrupts these bygone gems so he can rattle on in his clench-jawed breathlessness about the fresh-baked Italian bread in the rack next to him, and how it’s “so hot, hot, hot!” sounding like some disgusting college professor trying to pick up a freshman at the village wine bar. Plus, the chef’s hat he wears looks like he borrowed it from VIc Tayback, so we’ve never taken a single sample he’s tried to foist on us. And now he’s busy talking to one of the deli clerks, so we slide on past.
Our usual cashier, a delightful little lady named Miss Barbara, is not at work, so we pick the shortest line and get to stand there and watch the cashier, a lanky girl with her ponytail pulled back so tight she looks like a redheaded Chinese chick, and she’s taller than me which means I can add her to the growing list of People Who Look Like They Can Whip Me, and we watch as she tries to open and empty coin rolls into her drawer. It’s like watching Lucille Ball try to crack a wooden egg. Bang, bang, bang…pause, look at the roll, look at me, look at the roll…bang, bang bang….pause, look a the roll, look at one of the other cashiers…but she finally succeeds and I want to adopt her and pay for her tuition out of sheer gratitude because she doesn’t even do what I predicted (shatter the roll of quarters and watch them explode all over the floor and then call for a manager), and we manage to pay and get our receipt without incident, and no, we don’t want to contribute to whatever charity was just pushed at us, and out we go.
We pass the chairs up front again, and some of the faces have changed but the gossip goes on and so we hook through the doors. And as we exit and push the cart towards our car, we look up again at the high mountain peak nearby, knowing that the wild paint of fall colors will soon be all over it, and we laugh at the squealing children in the car near ours, and we remember what it was like to shop years ago in another state, in what felt like a Third-World battlezone, and the chef-hatted Samples Guy doesn’t seem so annoying, and look how cute the pigeons are up there on the power lines, arranged like notes on a clef, and we load the car and I put the cart away and we ease on through the lot to the exit and head on down the road, driving to that twisty road that will take us back up the mountain to the little homestead where the dogs are waiting and where my wife will turn some of what we bought into magic on the stove, and there are books to read, and perhaps a movie to watch later, and it’s still the weekend for now, and we’re going to enjoy it, even if it harelips the governor.
~ S.K. Orr