Kathleen McCall:
Occasional�� Muse�

2002-04-02 - 1:34 p.m.

Talking, with Groceries

I spent about a half-hour in the grocery yesterday chatting with a woman I hadn't seen in a while. Catching up. Yes, right there in the aisle of the grocery. Kind of kitty-cornered from the canned tuna. I had a cart, but I pushed it out of the way, and we created a private island where we talked about our lives and work and kids and men.

This was a good thing.

Man, people yakking in the grocery aisle used to irritate the hell out of me. Go out for COFFEE, why doncha, I'm tryin to shop here. But then, I didn't used to talk to clerks or checkers much, or strike up conversations with strangers looking over the same bananas.

I do, now.

"Do you KNOW her?" my kids ask me. "No," I say. "I was just talking to her." Incomprehensible. Embarrassing. Mom stuff. That I would say, "That's a beautiful fabric, did you make the dress?" to someone I don't even know. Or "Those look like good bananas - for next year."

Connections. Tiny little sparkling connections, the stuff of life, somehow.

It's middle aged stuff, isn't it? I know when I was younger, I had more important things to do. Places to go. Get my food, get my gasoline, get the hell on to whatever I was going to do next.

It's not that I have less to do, now. I don't; I have more. I'm always supposed to be somewhere else ten minutes ago. But it doesn't seem to make me any later or any slower, to look - really look - at other people. To make some sort of a momentary connection as I pass through. Something nice to leave; something nice to take away with me.

It lightens.

Collection agents on the phone are people. "Do you hate this job? This must be a hard job." Phone company guys. "Don't hang up! You're real! I know you're real!" Mortgage company people who have to run through a whole long spiel in one breath before they can talk to you. "Wow. That was amazing. How many times a day do they make you say that?" I'm human, they're human. They had to go to work too, and they don't get paid enough, and they sent a sick kid to school because they didn't have day care.

I'd rather talk to humans.

I had something else to be doing, in that time I talked to Deborah. But I made a decision to let it go. Timing put us in each others' paths, right there next to the tuna, and I've come to believe in fortuitous timing. In the value of making human connections. In making small personal islands of contact to carry me through the day.

I didn't even realize I'd learned that, until I saw that I was one of THOSE women, chattering away in the grocery store.

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