Dollar Spree

When I was in college in the sixties, one of my dorm buddies and I were watching the news showing American dead on the tarmac in Vietnam.  Stan suddenly said, “This is too sanitized.   We’re sitting here munching on popcorn and drinking chocolate milk watching kids our age die.  The Vietcong should invade San Francisco.  Then the powers that be will end the war.  It is just too neat.  It is like that Star Trek episode where two planets are at war for millennia because they have made pain and suffering too clean and easy.”

I watch the news every night now and feel the same way.  For some of us lucky people it is all too far away.

When I taught five high school English classes, the pace was fast and furious.  Grader of hundreds of tests and papers each week, creator of dozens of lesson plans each week, form filler and recommendation writer made the days twenty-five hours long…often longer.  Retirement is different.  My lesson plan for the day might be simply, “Get a haircut.”  Still, even without the professional commitments, some days are more hectic than others.  Take last Tuesday.

Polley and I fill the car with gas, a more infrequent event because of the corona virus, go to the gym for our twice weekly workouts, then have to stop at the grocery store, Food Are Us,  to pick up meals for the weekend.  My oldest daughter, her husband, and her children, Daniel and Sofia, are coming down from Connecticut to celebrate their twelfth birthday.  We discuss culinary strategy.  Should we make barbequed chicken on Saturday or roast pork?  How about Friday’s dinner?  Sausage and peppers or a pasta dish?  No, we always seem to serve pasta when they visit.  How about pork roast on Friday and chicken on Saturday?  What’s the weather forecast?  It is hard to barbeque in a torrential downpour.  We decide to not decide and buy two roasting chicken, a pork roast, and sausage and peppers.  Oh, and what kind of cereal do the grandchildren like?  All of it goes into the shopping cart.

Our next stop is the Dollar Spree store to purchase birthday plates and napkins.  These were necessary items for the birthday celebration.  We spent considerable time debating the aesthetic values of the birthday napkins, purple and yellow with a Minions theme or the pink and white Minnie Mouse ones.  Daniel likes the Minions, Sofia, Minnie Mouse.  We buy both and the matching paper plates.  Cruising down the toy aisle we spot a jigsaw puzzle of the United States, an activity that Sofia might like, a trio of water pistols (hey, three for a dollar can’t be bad!), a Minions ball that Daniel might like and a container of heavy duty drain declogger.  We both agreed that our drains were draining much too slow.

We got in line, following the directions on the floor to maintain the proper distance.  There was only one person ahead of us in line.  Suddenly a woman about our age, whose body formed an almost perfect “C,” stepped in front of us and through her mask asked, “Excuse me. Do you mind if I step in front of you just to ask the cashier if this is the line where I can purchase some helium balloons?”

Polley replied through her mask, “Sure.  Go ahead.”

“Thank you.”  The woman turned to the cashier, a teenage girl, and all we could hear was a muffled request.  We could see both women nodding their heads.

The lady turned to us.  “My mother is ninety-two and she is coming home from the hospital today.  She had the covid virus, but she got better…thank God.”

Polley said, “I am glad your mother is okay.  Why don’t you go ahead of us?”

“No, I can’t do that.  That is so nice of you though.”

“No.  I insist.  We are not in a rush.”

“Oh, thank you.  I appreciate it.  Can I pay for your purchases?”

“Oh, no. no.”

So the lady with the bent back, bent perhaps from the weight of taking care of her mother, picked out two balloons.  It was obvious to us that the teenage cashier had missed the Dollar Spree orientation program’s lesson on inflating helium balloons.  After she failed several times, we looked over at the line next to us which held only one customer whose cart was already filled.  We switched lines.

Bad move.

The lady with the cart already filled with plastic bags was counting out change from her purse.  I examined her cart.  Two half gallons of milk,  a loaf of bread on day-old- sale, two cans of tomato soup, two large cans of Hunter’s Stew, a package of diapers, a roll of paper towels, three cans of peas, and some other canned items I could not discern. The teenage cashier had five stacks of coins in front of her….several stacks of quarters, dimes, nickels and a pile of pennies.  She seemed overwhelmed with the counting.

She looked up from the four crinkled dollar bills and the stacks of coins and told the customer, “You’re ninety three cents short.”

The lady of the cart looked around and even through her mask we could sense her embarrassment.  She was a large person with a stretched out gray T-shirt and black pants with the tiniest hole in the right knee.  She looked like one of those school cafeteria food workers who winked and gave you an extra two chicken nuggets. She reached into her purse and pulled out a small handful of coins and passed them over to the cashier who cupped them in her hand and started counting the pennies.

I mentally counted with her as she took each penny and balanced it on one of her fingers.  She got completely thrown off when a dime materialized from the pile and she began recounting.  Polley and I looked at each other and shrugged.  I was wondering about the disposition of the two chickens and pork roast in our car being cooked by the ninety degree plus heat.  I have this prejudice against food poisoning.

It seemed as if the entire milky way galaxy had revolved around its center twice before the cashier said, “You’re eighty cents short.”

The lady looked at her cart, trying to decide what to return.

Polley said, “I have eighty cents.”

“Oh, no.  I can’t let you do that.”

“Please.  I have been in the same situation.”

I could see the woman’s eyes moisten.

“Thank you.”

“No problem.”

Before the lady was even out the door, the cashier had bagged our items and Polley had paid with a debit card.

As I walked to the car, I looked at both plastic bags.  Somehow the essentials in them did not seem so essential anymore.  Somehow the slow drainage of our plumbing system did not seem that important.  Somehow the reality that there is real and deep pain out there beyond our sheltered universe seemed more real.  Somehow I realized that not all shopping sprees are the same.

“To the people who think, the world is comic.  To the people who feel, the world is tragic.”  Horace Walpole