Perspective at the Meat Counter

I really need to stay out of the grocery store. Or at least stop going there by myself. When I don’t have to say “Sit still!” and “No!” and “We are not buying those today!” a million times to my children, I actually have time to look around and see my fellow shoppers.

And it invariably breaks my heart. Today it was the old man shuffling around in his sweats, his Irish tweed cap askew on his bushy white hair. He stopped for a long while at the paczki, picked up a box of apricot and then blueberry, but walked slowly away without them. We met up again at the deli and fish counter where he slowly sampled the crab dip and crackers laid out for customers. He didn’t buy anything there either.

His cart held just a few items. A miniature loaf of bakery bread, a few bananas, and a few other things I couldn’t make out from where I stood. I started to speak, but he turned before I got going and so I just gave up.

Turned my own cart and almost hit an older woman shopping alone. On the top of her cart were a bag of salad and a few boxes of fiber bars. She held her coat closed and her purse close to her chest. She was looking through the pork chops.

I don’t know why it makes me sad, to see these elderly solo shoppers. It’s my dream really. To shop alone and eat alone and buy exactly what I want at the grocery store: peacefully and on my own schedule.

But it always makes me wonder what I am missing. If the old man is finally getting away from his caregiver role for a bit, or the elderly lady is pinching her pennies hard. One glance and I am feeling their imagined pain. And I want to make it better with a donut or a smile.

But who’s to say that THEY aren’t the happy ones? That they are worried in similar ways about me, harried and unshowered and racing the clock to meet the school bus or the end of the pre-school class. Maybe the sadness I imagine in their eyes is really pity. And the memories of the difficult days they had when they were younger.

I think I will always struggle when I see these kind of shoppers. My empathy meets overdrive in grocery aisles. But perspective is a funny thing.

And maybe it really IS me who needs the donut. And the smile.