Life at the checkout

I’m at the grocery checkout. The woman in front of me waits for her groceries to be tallied. When the job is done, she needs to stand there for a couple of minutes to let the full impact of her bill sink in. In about a month, after she has stared blankly at the numbers on the machine which proclaim the harsh reality of her circumstances, she begins a process known as opening her purse.

Somewhere in there is – no, not there, or here, or under that – ah, another purse. Extracting that in the modern day science of non-filmed slow motion, purse No. 1 needs to be snapped shut so as to rest purse No. 2 on the top of it. Opening purse No. 2 is a millennial event, accompanied by dabs to the nose, sniffs, and sundry other ceremonious trappings befitting the bittersweet occasion.

After my children have become mature adults with families of their own, we begin a surgical technique which is accomplished by holding a wad of bills safely inside the purse with the thumb and forefinger of the left hand, while sliding a single note from the bundle with the thumb and forefinger of the right hand. That leaves for my middle and most productive years the counting out of change.

The change, of course, is taken out and put back in an elaborate scenario, each coin arrangement displayed on the flat of the hand until a mercifully accurate combination can be found. Meanwhile, wife dear wife is at the morticians attending to the necessary details.

As my family and friends return to the limousines and the scruffy gentlemen begin shoveling in the dirt on my aged and long-suffering remains, the woman is about to begin an evolutionary phenomenon called putting purse No. 2 back into purse No. 1.

Patience is a difficult thing to have to live with. To be honest, sometimes I think I’m going to die. – T.R.

written by Thomas A. Russell
first published in the Lafayette Sunday Visitor on October 19th, 1986