19 March 2020. Safeway by Night.
It's shocking, how much we waste--and how differently I think about this--day to day now, even around the house--when the use of something is tempered by the uneasy realization that soon there could be a limit to the supply. How much we take for granted, that is. In the interest of ease, of ongoingness--the efficiencies that allow for a semi-well-oiled machine of daily life to unfold against its theatrical backdrop of forever..
Not to make this overly apocalyptic. The six bags of Sumatra whole bean coffee did arrive. Is this hording? What's the worst I couldn't face--no decent coffee in the morning? That essential part of the ritual, gone? And yet it might be...
Last night, heading back up Solano, a bit after 9pm, just three or four cars in the Safeway lot. A surprise--maybe a good time to go in, non-existent lines? Reduced contact? I walk towards the doors, just one set open now--peer inside. That familiar ark of not-quite-so-wholesomeness--but part of the life, regardless. All the way back to Oceanside, when I was a boy--and the first Safeway store opened, to the Dubow family's great excitement. The beginning of unendingness. Must have been 1954, when we first moved to North County. The Korean War still in the air--and WWII before. So that these events (at least to my parents) must have felt like part of a new beginning. An uplift. Things the way you hoped they'd be...
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A story made the rounds (my mother must have told it, with a raised eyebrow and one of her sly smiles) that an enterprising Oceanside hooker had parked her U-Haul trailer there in the newly-available lot--doing business with young Marines. Another new beginning...
But yesterday evening, it was just the strangely beautiful blond girl--the clerk with the long, fine-spun white-gold hair, which she always keeps combed and impeccably straight, all the way down her back. Whenever I'd see her it felt as if even in weighing vegetables she might get it tangled--but this never seemed to happen...
She's a manager now, with that same blank, on-the-edge-of-dissatisfied expression. An unending background-level consternation. I've tried to say hello over the years, many times, but I think it's the very blankness that gets her through.
Tonight the store is already closed. New schedule for this impossible new time. And now, with one other clerk, she's there alone, at one of the registers, closing up...
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You want to be sympathetic here--a vignette carries the experience of life, after all. But these feelings have so much to do with noticing how we all live--in ways we could change. That in itself being positive... a form of hope...
