Leave The Line

This taller man with a mustache wearing a yellow short-sleeve button down and a sea blue baseball cap left the line at the general store yesterday for why I did not know at the moment. The line stretched like a rotary phone cord around the store’s narrow aisles and for the four of us closest to the counter we were near the finish after 20 some minutes. The man--second in line--set down his fresh bread, dish soap, razor and what looked like calamine lotion. I remember because these seemed like an odd but perhaps perfectly normal set of things to get at a store like this. He rushed quickly to the creaky wooden door looking part Burt Reynolds, part Nathan Lane in the way he moved. He softly pulled the brown bag away from an older lady who was losing hold of the bag and beginning to fall, then held the door with his left hand and her hand with his right and made his way outside. Nothing really changed inside the store and when the man returned about 3 minutes later he calmly scooped up his bread and dish soap, his razor and lotion, stopped and stared for what seemed like a minute then made his way to the very back of that long line. “Sir, sir – is that all?” the lady Billie behind the counter said to me. I hadn’t realized I had moved up to the front, so I nodded in the way you do when your mind is somewhere else and then placed my items down and after a long pause said, “actually, um, Billie, can you add to the bill the 4 items for that man over there?” In a sort of abrupt way Billie called for the man to come up, waving him over the way Bob Barker used to on that ‘80s game show. He reluctantly did so and took out his wallet but Billie, God Bless her, said “This short guy with the Italian hat is taking care of your stuff.”

...On the way outside I introduced myself and asked him his name. “Fran, well Francis, but I go by Fran.” “Nice to meet you – that lady you helped back there, was that your…mom, a friend?” “Oh no,” he chuckled, “definitely not my mom. She’d never have let me take the bag….I don’t know who that was.” Funny how sometimes humanity just shows up from time to time, just need to look up I suppose. Best $13 I’ve spent this week...