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When I join the line, I’m shopper No. 3, directly behind a blond ponytailed woman. Number one, the one at the checkout, is a woman in a white sweater. I have this amazing penchant for choosing the line that will stop: The drawer will run out of sufficient change or the clerk will be underaged for alcohol sales or someone’s debit card will act balky. And so I am not surprised when the line’s progression snags.
“Look at these tomatoes,” the customer at the checkout announces, holding one of her tomatoes up in the air and twirling both it and herself back and forth, apparently to show all of us. It takes this woman a while to unload her cart, pondering the importance of each item—the can of peas, a loaf of bread, milk, frozen fish sticks
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The white sweater woman then begins to carefully navigate her money. It’s not easy for her, as apparently many things are not. I’ve seen her often, at the store and in the street. We’ve even exchanged hellos. She doesn’t see me.
When she finally is done and satisfied, and politely thanks the patient clerk, she is $12.60 short. The woman with the blond ponytail whips out a $20 bill and says, “That’s all right. I’ll pay the difference.” She’s not rude or short-tempered. The transaction occurs: The clerk accepts the additional money, hands the change back to the blond, and the line shifts a little, all of us preparing to move forward.
Suddenly our should-be-all-finished woman’s voice cracks the air, tinged with concern, almost fear. “Oh, dear, but I’m so sorry, I have to put some of my things back. You need to take some back. I need some money until my check comes,” she says, realizing she has spent every dime she has. Not realizing, we are all sure, that she has spent someone else’s dimes, too.
The clerk and the ponytailed woman ahead of me—neither can be over 20—and I all look at each other. The manager comes, the items go back, change is returned to the shopper, and she is ever so grateful, ever so polite, and says, “Thank you and God bless” as she pushes her cart toward the door into the bright early-evening light, waving back at us.
The young clerk says, “You’re very welcome,” and smiles at the waver.
I am so grateful to have witnessed this slice of humanity that I fumble six one-dollar bills from my wallet and palm them to the young woman ahead of me. “Let me share this with you,” I say. I mean the gift of this interchange, not the money, really. I am almost in tears.
There’s an old Chinese tale about an elephant coming upon a hummingbird lying flat on its back on the ground, with its feet in the air. When the elephant asks what the hummingbird is doing, it answers that it has heard that the sky might fall that day, and it is ready to hold the sky up, in case it falls. The elephant laughs and asks, “Do you think those little feet can do anything?” The hummingbird says, “Not alone, but each must do what he can. And this is what I can do.”
I must write a letter to the store about this clerk, about this customer behind the customer, doing what each could do. I can do this.
Annaliese Jakimides is a writer and visual artist. Her work is included in the recently published anthology The Other Side of Sorrow and in the current issue of Utne magazine.
