I pulled my cart up to the check out. A young man with white pines tattooed on his arm slid my milk, rice crisps, beans, eggs, ninety-nine cent fruit across the glass recording prices. “How are you?” I asked.
“Today’s my last day,” he announced.
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to work for the Forest Service near Santa Fe. I’ll do multiple jobs like planting trees, working with wildlife, clearing forest.” He explained how the forest had become dry tinder for fires and needed to be cleared. There’s a salamander there, that only comes out when it rains. because it lives in the ground. It’s so rare, the forest service left that area untouched.
According to Wild Earth Guardians, “To protect the Jemez Mountains salamander, one must safeguard the Jemez Mountains—a striking landscape characterized by large tracts of undisturbed wilderness, rocky peaks, and mountain streams.”
Suddenly, this ordinary check-out clerk became a mythic guardian, full of enthusiasm and hope for work he will throw his body into, to make the forest right, to protect a tiny animal, to do good in the world. My heart lifted up as I followed my husband Bruce to our car, hopeful there are many like him, finding work that helps us all.
It’s funny how making small talk with someone you only see for the minutes they spend pricing your groceries, can make a real connection. I wish I’d had my business card handy to suggest we stay in touch.
I’m Katie Andraski and that’s my perspective.
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More Meditation on How Shopping Can Ease Loneliness
To be honest there are times, I ache with loneliness so badly, being in the grocery store, trying to catch people’s eye, eases my isolation. I feel like a very old lady, whose core friends have already passed away, and I’m waiting for my turn. (I began feeling this in my thirties after my parents and brother fell asleep–how early Christians referred to people dying.) Many people I considered close friends are still alive. I didn’t make the cut as their lives have filled up. Those rejections ache like arthritic joints when storms brew.
Docs say loneliness can take years off your life. They say to keep your brain active be sure to get out and socialize. Christian preachers say we’re not whole unless we’re in community. Writer teachers say you need community to write well. I say good way to make a person feel worse. Though I think about The Way of the Pilgrim where the pilgrim craves solitude so he can enjoy sweet communion with God and how the prophets weren’t well liked by their communities.
Aside from church, shopping has become a rich source of socializing and friendship. Those few minutes of being around people while shopping and chatting with random people or the check out person can drive off the funk like a border collie might drive sheep out to pasture.
This practice of ordering groceries over the phone, was jump started by the Covid lockdowns, though when I was a young girl my mother phoned in her groceries, and my dad brought them home. A local farmer delivered milk made from Guernseys who pastured across the river from us, bottles with cream at the top. Back then I think we lived in a bit of a food desert, out there in the country, a mile in off the main road. When Stonewell, a small grocery store on New Scotland Road, opened, we shopped there.
I see people working for Woodman’s, their eyes on phones, pushing a cart selecting products. This service for people who can’t leave their houses is valuable, but it increases the isolation of the frail elderly and disabled. We lose the marvels of getting out of the house to shop, where we are surrounded by people, doing the same thing. We are missing out on the ancient, human need to gather, buy goods and talk to the storekeeper or other shoppers.
The other day, when we grocery shopped, I became part of a mini community that included a short trim woman with gray curly hair who grabbed her cart the same time I did, and pushed it to her car just as we pushed ours out the sliding doors. I stepped alongside a woman, her head covered in a black hijab, to grab some broccoli. Her son handed her a bag of potatoes. A tall woman with gray strands in her long hair, bustled her three daughters dressed in matching dresses with pink and white stripes along the aisles. Her son rode in the cart. She moved through the store rapidly. I wondered what the story is with this family dressed up on a Friday afternoon. A gentleman smiled when I almost ran into him.
Members of Christ Lutheran have called the store St. Woodman’s because we’d often run into each other, making a mini reunion. Those encounters can be holy encounters. The other day Bruce ran into a childhood friend and his wife. We stood in the wide aisle talking for quite sometime, catching up on our lives, thankful the aisles were wide so we could stay out of people’s way. Several times when I have been particularly discouraged, I have run into Pastor Loren, who quietly says you’re on the right track, keep writing.
Once at the Verizon store, I struck up a conversation about the latest iPhones with a kind looking woman. A few weeks later I walked into Weight Watchers and said, “I know you from somewhere.” We figured out it was the Verizon store. We struck up conversations after each meeting and a friendship took hold. Now I consider Charlyne, one of my closest friends, the friendship surviving not being able see each other in person for several years. When we finally met at Jason’s Deli, I sat across from a woman who had grown radiant despite life difficulties, who is tapping her creativity, and who is my friend. What a relief to talk for hours and defy isolation.
What would it be like if we went shopping with the following words from C.S. Lewis on our mind? How would we view the person taking forever to choose a tea, blocking your ability to sweep in and nab the flavor you needed. How would we view the screaming child and parent trying to comfort a tantrum that won’t be comforted? Or the very old person, walking slowly, leaning on their shopping cart? Or the man with the sharp features and a beard who could almost be a pirate? What if there are other people who are aching with loneliness like I ache sometimes? How would that change how we view those mini communities that gather in the places we shop?
Here are C.S. Lewis’s words, words I try to live by, “There are no ordinary people,” C.S. Lewis said in The Weight of Glory. “You have never talked to a mere mortal” (15). Earlier in the essay, he says, “The load, or weight, or burden of my neighbor’s glory should be laid daily on my back, a load so heavy that only humility can carry it, and the backs of the proud will be broken. It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature, which if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship, or else a horror and a corruption, such as you now meet, if only in a nightmare” (14 – 15).
Works Cited
“Jemez Mountains Salamander.” WildEarth Guardians, 16 Mar. 2021, wildearthguardians.org/wildlife-conservation/endangered-species-list/amphibians/jemez-mountains-salamander/#:~:text=Ninety%20percent%20of%20the%20Jemez,rocky%20peaks%2C%20and%20mountain%20streams.
Lewis, C. S. The Weight of Glory, and Other Addresses. W.B. Eerdmans, 1977.
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