By Jim Bowman
Wed Jnl of OP & RF, 7/7/04
You are sent to the store to buy bananas, English muffins, apple sauce, toilet paper, Clorox bleach, oleo, ginger ale, Coke, Bufferin, eggs, popsicles, and medicinal chewing gum – the standard Saturday-afternoon list. You also intend to buy what you want – a couple of nice dinner salads, fresh garlic to keep you from growing old – rather, from feeling old while you grow old – and whatever else catches your fancy.
You choose Dominick's on Lake Street, a few blocks to the east, a store you have come to like for its succulent assortments and genial help. You have an adventure.
The raspberries make a pleasant start. Two for the price of one: a good deal if they are not overpriced in the first place, which they seem not to be, though you are not an expert in these matters. But you go ahead and splurge. Won't they be nice on your All-Bran topped with delicious skim milk.
You keep moving among the produce, snagging bananas as instructed and adding plums and pears of your own choosing. Oh the joy of it. The pears are of a sort that never turn up in your kitchen. You decide it's time to find out why. Add grapefruit even if it isn't quite the season, and you have your fresh fruit for the day.
But you can't find garlic, which you have just read about in Earl Mindell's Anti-Aging Bible, where it says the Delany sisters, well into their second century, ate some every day with their cod liver oil. Should be among the mushrooms but isn't. You ask an employee on her way somewhere. She takes a brief look among the mushrooms, then keeps going, promising to send "someone from produce." She does not.
On to the deli counter for some salad. It's nice that no one comes at you asking what you want. It gives you time to look around, unhurried. You like the slaw. The slaw is a go. You stop your looking at the food and look at the woman behind the counter, up in years though no Delany sister, who is marching to the beat of her drummer, fixing things, not looking up. You make some head movements, catch her eye.
She asks what she can do for you. Some slaw, please. Asked to repeat that, you do. The slaw is scooped out. A half pound is just right. It is weighed on one scale, then on another down the counter. Not clear why.
You make another choice. Some mermaid salad, please. Another half pound is weighed first on one scale, then another. The two containers are placed on the counter. Are they priced? You are shown the tag, pasted on the bottom. OK.
You leave and head south, that is, to the rear of the store, which, keep in mind, is your usual football-field-size warehouse with shelves and signs. Up and down the aisles you go, careful with your cart not to crash into other carts or the occasional wheeled shopper in her motorized rickshaw.
You come upon muffins, Clorox, ginger ale, Coke, eggs, oleo – somehow, in the face of odds. They are items that pop out at you. But alas, in due time the odds catch up. You find yourself near Valhalla, check-out land but not ready for it. A young employee darts past, you catch his or her eye, you are momentarily unsure. It's a he, and he wants to help. Can he find the apple sauce? He can. Follow him, he says, throwing over his shoulder the wonderful news that the Sox are ahead "fourteen to zero." Good, you say, following.
At the apple sauce, you try for another. Toilet paper? "Aisle fifteen." Thanks. But this advice is as erroneous as the Sox score, manufactured perhaps from shattered dreams: There is no Aisle Fifteen.
You resume your wandering lonely as a cloud, eventually encountering an angel in the shape of a young woman employee way over in the store's far corner. This time you pull out your slip of paper and ask for aisle numbers. She counts them off, including aisle 13 (not 15) for the t.p., but doubting that there would be any medicinal chewing gum. For Bufferin and the doubtful gum, it's 10; for popsicles it's 14.
Cart full, you head for checkout land, where all goes well until the bagger spots another employee illegally mopping up a spill – it's a contract issue? – and informs the checkout woman, who begins to call for the mopping woman while continuing to mark up your purchases. You as customer meanwhile work at monitoring the checkout process, keeping an eye on your purchases as the bagger leaves her post to attend personally to the errant mop-wielder. You also work at filtering out the music from above, a contemporary-format Volga-boat song, a sort of rap-style Yo-oh, heave-ho.
The mop-wielder desists, but the bagger, like the Kingston Trio's traveller on the MTA, never returned. She had maybe gone to check with the shop steward – unless the checker is the steward, which is why she had to get after the mopping one. If the mopper had moped instead of mopped, would anything have been said?
Meanwhile, your purchases checked out and paid for, several items remain languishing on the counter. You ask, Will anyone bag the rest of this? Yes, a young man appears out of nowhere and stoically completes the task. You thank anyone who's listening, wheel your cart out, in the opposite direction of the spill, and head for your car. Yahoo!
posted by Jim Bowman @ 7/17/2004 03:22:00 PM
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