The Perfect Song Blog

After I leave the transfer station, I turn right and drive to Wal Mart for a few things. I stand in line and watch Associate Joyce who is 60-ish short, overweight and walks with a limp.

I’ve noticed that a lot of women who work in WalMart are overweight and walk with a limp. I haven’t had time to really study this and compare the number of right leg limpers to left leg limpers, but I think it would be interesting to know.

A considerable number of them are missing teeth, too.

Those Associates are a colorful bunch. I never see them in Wal Mart’s TV ads.

As Joyce rings me up, the woman behind me pushes something on the counter and says, “You can take this, too.”

Joyce looks down: “Hmm. A Praying Mantis.”

Ahh, I think. There’s actually something in Wal Mart that isn’t made in China.

Joyce puts her finger on the counter and the Praying Mantis hops aboard, as if the two of them do this often. (How do you rehearse with a mantis? Patience and prayer, of course). She holds it up as she waddles with a limp over to a cart loaded with empty cartons. She puts her finger down by the handle bar. “Here, get on this,” she says to the Praying Mantis in a conversational voice.

The bug likes her finger, but finally tries to crawl onto the cart. It promptly falls to the floor, most decidedly out of prayer mode. All of us customers stare at it for a minute, decide some things are beyond our control and go back to paying for our goods.

Joyce tells me to have a nice day and sounds like she means it but I’m not sure she does. She’s just good at it.

Over to Tops to pick up prescriptions and supplies. I spend 15 minutes looking in the ice cream freezer for Friendly’s Peanut Butter Cup. A short, stocky woman appears and stands behind me. “Sorry if I’m in your way,” I say.

She shakes her head. “That’s okay. Would you reach up to that top shelf and get me one of those cartons of cherry vanilla? I assess the situation. She’s right. She can’t reach it. I fumble around until I have one.

I leave Tops with my shopping cart full. A man in a small car pulls up to the stop sign to my left. I start to cross when he hits the gas. He sees me and slams on the brake.

The mind is an amazing thing. You can spend an hour thinking about supper or a book your reading. Faced with an emergency, in a split second you can think: Oh my God he’s going to hit me and scatter my groceries all over the place and I’ll be lying in the parking lot bruised and scraped and broken and they won’t let me move until the ambulance arrives and people will be hanging around staring and shaking their heads at the shame of it but they’ve got to get going because they’re on a tight schedule and the ambulance loads me in and I go to the emergency room where they repair me as best they can and put me in a room to recuperate only after my wife as assures them we have insurance and I painfully heal while opening get well cards and I spend the rest of my life walking with a limp . . . .

A few moments later the man parks near me and gets out. He’s a huge black guy who adds 400 pounds to that car every time he gets in it. He waves, “Hey, sorry about that.”

“No problem ,” I wave back. I’m not hurt, your insurance won’t raise and we can get on with the next steps in our day.

Get up, grab coffee, go outside to throw the balls for the three dogs.  Back inside, make breakfast–fried eggs, sausage, toast from home made bread and juice.

I run to Miniers Plaza two miles away to get my haircut at Shear Knowledge where Karen has been cutting my hair for a decade. She knows my hair better than I do. We both love to read and watch movies so she usually tells me about her favorite authors and I give her a couple movie reviews.

We just watched V for Vendetta last night which I loved.

Back home. Gather the garbage, throw it in the Jeep and head to the bank before it closes at noon. The teller who looks like Jennifer Aniston cashes my check. I love looking at her but I limit myself to glances. My daughter once told me while having breakfast in a hometown restaurant in Utah that I stare at people too much.

“I’m a writer. I study people.”

“You stare too long.”

“Is it that noticeable?”

“Yes.”

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Don’t stare so long.”

Off to the transfer station where I talk with the pleasant horse faced man who’s retired, chews gum and smokes cigarettes. We talk about tomatoes because we both grow them, him successfully, half successfully. “Yeah, I give a lot of them away, now that my wife is gone,” he says for the 20^th time. He stares somewhere far off and deep inside for a moment.

He looks over at the airport right beside the transfer station. “You go back by the airport, you take a look at them planes.” I look over at a fleet of corporate jets. There are races going on at Watkins Glenn. “They here for the races?” I ask.

He nods once. “If you and I had the money that just one of them planes cost, we’d never need to work again.” He thinks a minute. “Course, that kind of life is pretty grueling, too. I did it the last three years I worked.”

This surprised me. I had taken for granted that he had been some kind of blue collar worker. “What did you do?” I asked.

“I was with 3M. The last three years they flew me all over the world to help them set up. I was all over the Middle East. The worst place was Morocco. Man, you leave Casa Blanca and go out in the rural areas and they’re 75 years behind everybody else.

“The employees, the first week, worked a 40-hour week. Then they started coming in later. Then they had to have hour breaks. Pretty soon they were working maybe an hour a day. They knew the king or bought their way to the royalty and got away with it.

“One day I needed a five-gallon can of gas and the place you got it was maybe from here to there.” He pointed to the Olive Garden maybe a 10^th of a mile from us. “I had to ask for it through my interpreter, of course. The worker said he’d get it. I never saw him again the rest of the day. The next day I asked for it again. The worker said he would, then left at 11 and I didn’t see him again. The next day I said to the interpreter, ‘you tell him to bring me that gas or I’ll track him down and knock his head off!’ I got my gas okay, and pretty quick, too!”