Short Story

There was an overweight, frumpy lady who used to come into the grocery store on Thursday evenings. I don’t think it was every week. Usually more like twice a month. Super Valu was a small operation: one manager, one checkout girl (yes, they were all girls), and one bagger. I did a hell of a lot more in that place than just bag groceries, but that was the easiest thing to call me. The Thursday evening shift was 3-10pm. The store closed at 10 and that’s exactly when I liked to be walking out the door to head to my truck.

But it never worked out that way with this lady. Maybe she liked the solitude. Maybe she had some mental issues. I don’t know. But she never showed up a minute earlier than 9:50pm. She waddled in with her oversized handbag and a fistful of coupons, paused at the carts, and took a look around with her mouth half open as if she needed to familiarize herself with the surroundings, like she had never been there before. Were the greeting cards there two weeks ago? Are those the vegetables? Seems like the bakery was over here last week? I was irritated at the sight of her. Get on with it lady.

I wish I could say that she managed to do her shopping in the remaining 10 minutes, but she didn’t. It was bad enough that she was messing up my freshly mopped aisles, the ones that were not quite dry yet. You have to let them dry completely before the carts start rolling through them otherwise they look worse than they did when you started! She would take her time moseying through the store as if she had walked in 10 minutes after we opened at 7 am and had 13 hours to do her shopping. The night manager, Ferren, hated her as much as I did. He had a family, wife and kids, and wanted to get home as much as I did, even though home was never my final destination. Taco Johns was more like it. Ferren did what any reasonable authority would do in this type of situation: at 10pm he would politely make the announcement on the loudspeaker that the store was closing. At 10:05pm, he shut off the lights on her.

Despite the hint of disorientation as she entered the store, this lady apparently knew Kennedy’s Super Valu well enough that she could find her foodstuff necessities in the dark. I continually glanced up the aisles because I was sure that she was probably using a flashlight. Never caught her though. By this time the Lois had rolled in to count the drawer money and “do the books”. She was a first class bitch in my book, but her biweekly redeeming moment was when she wandered back in the dark to find our night owl shopper to (im)politely tell her to get the hell out of the store.

Even as she slow-rolled it up to the checkout counter, our Mrs. Frumpy didn’t have a clue that she was inconveniencing anyone. She managed to find three bags worth of groceries in 25 minutes of shopping, 10 minutes of it in the dark. After five more minutes of haggling over coupons and prices for what she believed to be damaged fruit, she finally got around to paying. By that time it was 10:15 and my friends outside are getting irritated. The Taco John’s parking lot was the place to hang out, not Super Valu.

In Iowa we carry the groceries out, it’s expected. In a parking lot that was empty with the exception of my truck, Ferren’s clunker, Lois’s Cadillac and my friend’s Ford Fairmont, the Thursday night hassle parked her late seventies sedan five rows back from the front door. Maybe she was expecting a rush on green seedless grapes? I pushed the cart out and fidgeted with my dirty white apron while she worked to get the door unlocked and open the back door. The same thing happened every week so I knew what was coming. Even in the dim parking lot light I could see that her car was full of crap, all the way up past the windows. She fussed in the back seat for a moment. “Just put them right here,” she said, smiling. “Right here” was a space of about 10x20 inches for three paper bags of groceries and two gallons of milk.

During my first month at Super Valu I tried to delicately make the groceries fit, digging a little bit more of a hole on my own to try to make it work. It was no easy task and I was always a little nervous about what I might uncover. But it didn’t take long for this lady to wear on my nerves enough that the niceties ended. After awhile I just shoved the groceries into her car with as much force as necessary. Mike the owner, Lois the bookkeeper, and Ferren the manager were pretty big on customer service, but this lady irritated all of us, a common enemy. So I was able to get away with it.

Driving away five minutes later I forgot about her… until the next Thursday.

"A sailor has a peculiar cut to his clothes, and a way of wearing them which a green hand can never get" - Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Yesterday I finished the book "Two Years Before the Mast" by Richard Henry Dana, Jr. The author wrote the book from his journal entries during a two year voyage as a common seaman back in 1834. Here are a couple of my favorite passages...

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"As she was to get under way early in the afternoon, I made my appearance on board at twelve o'clock, in full sea rig, with my chest, containing an outfit for a two or three years' voyage, which I had undertaken from a determination to cure, if possible, by an entire change of life, and by a long absence from books, with a plenty of hard work, plain food, and open air, a weakness of the eyes, which had obliged me to give up my studies, and which no medical aid seemed likely to remedy."

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"My little knowledge of a vessel was all at fault. Unintelligible orders were so rapidly given, and so immediately executed; there was such a hurrying about, and such an intermingling of strange cries and stranger actions, that I was completely bewildered. There is not so helpless and pitiable an object in the world as a landsman beginning a sailor's life."

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"I shall never forget the delightful sensation of being in the open air, with the birds singing around me, and escaped from the confinement, labor, and strict rule of a vessel—of being once more in my life, though only for a day, my own master. A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is perfect. He is under no one’s eye, and can do whatever, and go wherever, he pleases. This day, for the first time, I may truly say, in my whole life, I felt the meaning of a term which I had often heard—the sweets of liberty."

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"Stimson and myself determined to keep as much together as possible, though we knew that it would not do to cut our shipmates; for, knowing our birth and education, they were a little suspicious that we would try to put on the gentleman when we got ashore, and would be ashamed of their company; and this won’t do with Jack. When the voyage is at an end, you may do as you please, but so long as you belong to the same vessel, you must be a shipmate to him on shore, or he will not be a shipmate to you on board."

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In speaking of San Francisco... "But it has been through its season of Heaven-defying crime, violence, and blood, from which it was rescued and handed back to soberness, morality, and good government, by that peculiar invention of Anglo-Saxon Republican America, the solemn, awe-inspiring Vigilance Committee of the most grave and responsible citizens, the last resort of the thinking and the good, taken to only when vice, fraud, and ruffianism have intrenched themselves behind the forms of law, suffrage, and ballot, and there is no hope but in organized force, whose action must be instant and thorough, or its state will be worse than before. A history of the passage of this city through those ordeals, and through its almost incredible financial extremes, should be written by a pen which not only accuracy shall govern, but imagination shall inspire."

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Being a Navy man, I really enjoyed reading about the life of a "real" Sailor back in the days of sailing ships. It's my heritage, and so many of our traditions are built upon life at sea during those days. I'm glad that a Harvard boy (Richard Henry Dana, Jr.) decided to write this book!