I don’t go to church. I go to the grocery store. Market Basket is one of the many places where I feel the pathos of humanity, people making their way in the world…where the lady rolls slowly down the baking aisle in her motorized wheelchair, the burly dad with a nose ring looks for canned fruit with his pre-teen son, the lady tells her daughter she’s going to make fish chowder, the old man pours over the stale bread rack and the young mother digs for the nicest bunch of chard.
The handsome young man in the camel hair coat is blind. He is perhaps 25, holds his long cane in an elegant upright position with one hand, like a shepherd watching over his flock. He keeps the other hand in contact with the cart. The older woman who accompanies him, leaves the young man and the cart to gather needed items. They are so good to one another, these two – all kindness and gentleness. They move through the store with a slow dignity, picking and choosing.
Grocery store divinity. Every day. People taking care of life, feeding themselves, their families.
I whisk up and down the aisles, thinking of them all, steering my cart around other shoppers, employees stocking shelves, little children crouched in front of candy displays. From the outside, I appear to be looking for a certain brand of tea but I am really thinking about what it would be like to be blind, or old, or physically limited. I seem to be musing over my choice of sausage, but I am lost in thought about the thrill of towering cumulus clouds, sunrises at Joppa, the magic of snow falling in the light of the streetlamp on the walk home from the latest movie at The Screening Room.
The cashier says he wonders why he volunteered to work an extra two hours.
The big kid wearing an employee orange vest moves from cashier to cashier saying hi to everyone, telling them their birthdays because he remembers them all. He hasn’t had to learn the sad lesson that we need to be worried what people will think of us. He is exhuberant. He asks the kid bagging my groceries what his birthday is, what year he was born. 1972? I wasn’t born yet. He starts to bag my groceries, looks at me. I’m 67, I offer, dropping my peaches into a bag. Born in 1950, he answers without skipping a beat. Righto! When’s your birthday? he wants to know. June 16, I tell him. Do you know Phil Mickelson? he asks, and before I can answer, he continues. He’s June 16, 1970. He’s 47 - twenty years younger than you. Wow, I say. That’s pretty good! What’s your name, he asks. Kate, I tell him, then ask what’s yours? He gets distracted and greets someone at the next checkout counter. Hi Nancy! When’s your birthday? My checkout kid tells me with a smile that this guy will remember all these names and birthdays. I ask Birthday Man when his birthday is. October 15, 1974… I’m 43. Bye, Kate, he hollers after me, as I’m leaving.
Another day, Katerina is at the check out, scanning my cereal, bananas, chicken, tonic water and on and on. Everyone now wears masks. As I slide my credit card into the machine I see Katerina’s fingernails She has put a bright red sold sticker on each nail of her left hand She looks like Carol Channing or Dolly Parton. Nice fingernails! I like the stickiness, she answers. She takes the red circles on and off, on and off. I like the feel of them, she tells me. The stickiness helps me with my anxiety.
Today’s cashier is Maite. Beautiful name. I’m a lover of languages I say…is that…Spanish? yes. I say. Tengo qué praticar mi español, I say. Muy bonita. Gracias, says Maite, with a grand smile. The lady bagging joins in the conversation, sharing her hopes for the New Year - la paz, el amor y prosperidad por todos. She sends me off, blessing me in the name of Jesus Christ.
I grew up Catholic, with Original Sin, confession, absolution, holy days of obligation. Every religion has its attempts at describing the indescribable, but in the end, life is a mystery. My husband gave me the gift of musing that we are all part of a universal soul. I like that. Each one of us is a thin slice off the universe - every slice is part of the mystery puzzle. We all belong to divine unknowingness. We are all lost and we are all found. If nothing else, we’re all in the same boat. We’re all at Market Basket, choosing the nicest looking apples or the right cut of beef.
The old lady with twisted arthritic hands, wearing a pink sequined hat is buying a big bag of apples and two 5 lb. bags of sugar. You making apple pie? I ask. Yes, I was going to make mince pie, but they don’t sell the boxed mince anymore. The stuff in the bottle is too sweet.
Follow me to the produce section where a two year old in little red glasses (what is it about little kids in glasses?) wiggles with excitement in the grocery cart.
The vegetable guy - a leprechaun of a banana man. I tell him he looks like my brother-in-law’s brother Jimmy. Brings back all the old stories about Jimmy’s journey through one scheme after another, always swearing that this one will be the best ever; selling swimming pools to the Saudis, a fleet of trucks to clean out storm drains, usually draining his own bank account.
I ask if I can take his picture. He hesitates. As long as you don’t put it on the internet. He says he used to work for a big company, had 125 people under him, flew all over the world, went to Hawaii 4 times, never had to pay. His name is Tom O’Hara. I tell him we’re probably all related.
Bagging groceries today is Antonietta, an older Italian woman. She works while I try out some of my rusty Italian. She’s broke. Lost all her money in an online scam.
The guy in front of me was frustrated with the long line. You can meditate I told him. I do that, he said. After the divorce, I lost everything. Everything. A million and a half dollars. I moved to the beach. He wore a tight fitting t-shirt and had a lightning tattoo on his arm.
We bump along in our lives. We marry or don’t marry, we have children or don’t, we question our choices, we rejoice in our victories, we savor the peace or look for more adventure. We are self-satisfied or troubled at any given moment on any given day in any given year. Life is full of change. But one thing never changes. We have to eat to survive.
My last stop today is at the fish counter. Fish are arranged in orderly rows, receding towards the back of the case, appearing to shrink and disappear as planes converge into distant vanishing points. I realize it’s my friend eyeing the salmon. She is soft-spoken and kind, petite and orderly, her blond hair cut in a tidy bowl shape. A dancer and a painter, she creates peaceful pastel landscapes with softened edges, gracious ballerinas twisting towards perfection and rusted tractors in peaceful overgrown fields. She has also illustrated many children’s books with kind old-fashioned shopkeepers or hedgehogs or donkeys, who all go about their business with patience and time-honored integrity.
As we consider which fish to buy, I ask the usual How are things? She hesitates, looking up towards TODAY’S SPECIALS and says, Well, we’ve hit a bit of a hitch in the road.
Fauvist greens and crimsons seep through the cracks, tilting the usual towards the strange and radical. I’ve been diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer, she tells me. She is speaking a foreign language. It has spread to my bones.
The fish monger is now a flat cartoon, broken into triangles, outlined in black. The pickerel flatten, their glassy eyes popping from their silver skins. The monkfish begin to swim out of their prison, flapping up towards the ceiling fan, where they fragment and shatter into a million pieces. Squid foreshorten into twisting ballerinas, salmon steaks distort into old tractors, appearing shallower than the original and the grocery aisles skew off in a dizzying display of multiple perspectives.
I don’t remember if I bought any fish.
Smoke and Mirrors, a Sullivan/Price Jam
Loved walking around Market Basket with you! And the music? Fun and wonderful!
Who plays the violin?
I loved this! Kind of like stopping to smell the roses 💕