Grocery Bag Blues

I don’t really know quite what was wrong with the bagger at the grocery store tonight. I don’t remember having seen him there before, though he also looked a little familiar to me. He looked about my age, maybe a little older, but he also looked like he had long since hit the wall. His hair, parted in the middle and with the shaggy remnants of a feathered cut that was probably stylish when he adopted it in the ’70s, had a white streak about two inches on either side of the part, so anyone who thought he wasn’t dying his hair somewhere would have to prove it to me. Whether it was the white or the sandy part, I wouldn’t want to pass judgment.

And to be fair, one whole entrance of the store and the bottle return room were closed off, hand-written signs of apology for the inconvenience taped to the doors, whatever issues there were hidden behind a stack of sidewalk deicer pails and some hastily shifted cardboard displays. Clearly, some kind of grocery store trauma, and it’s possible my bagger was involved. He could have been. And that could have set him off-kilter for the rest of the night. (I know how that works, as my entire day was set off-kilter by the simple fact that because of a couple of strategically placed auto accidents, I found myself actually unable to cross the river to get to work for about two hours this morning, and the day didn’t get better from there.)

And, honestly, as someone who doesn’t drink or get high, and who hasn’t for a very very long time, I have lost my awareness that other people do. It always comes as a surprise when I encounter someone who’s drunk or stoned, to catch a whiff of dope on a ski slope (of all places), to find someone at the Y who’s had a few, to run into drunken people in line at the Target. (Haven’t lost my eye for speed freaks, tweakers, and others whose pharmaceutical proclivities make them somewhat less predictable — as Hunter S. said, you can turn your back on a man, but never turn your back on a drug.) So, it’s entirely possible that my bagger was, . . . . No, I’m sorry, I was going to say “in the bag,” which is a pun even I would be ashamed of, and besides, does anyone say “in the bag” anymore? I’m so out of touch. Crispy? Is “crispy” still cool? Okay, let’s just say it’s possible he had imbibed. Something.

Or perhaps he was just having an existential crisis. I mean, what do I know about his life? He could have spent two hours stuck in traffic just three miles from his destination this morning, too. His girlfriend could have broken up with him. His cat could have coughed up something alarming and foreboding. He could just be tired of the rat race, of being a bagger in his forties, of trying to put together a life without a clue how to do it. It could all have just been too much for him.

And I really think that’s all it was. I think life was just too much for my bagger this evening, because suddenly the choices were just too much for him. Although I always present my groceries in a semi-organized fashion — cold with cold, poison with poison, paper goods all together, meats on the side — he just couldn’t . . . quite . . . figure . . . out . . . how to bag it all. He made little piles of things that should go together, then — crisis of confidence! — changed his mind. He placed things in bags, and pulled some of them back out again. I buy eggs seldom, but tonight was one of those nights, and I truly regret, for the eggs, the eggs — the eggs caused him no end of difficulty.

In the end, he gave up on the endless possible combinations, abandoned all decision-making, found himself unable to reconcile his earlier choices with a need to get everything back into the cart — and he pretty much put every item in its own bag. Some bags got two items, but two appears to have been the maximum. Most of the bags had to be reinspected before being placed in the cart, and the eggs, the eggs found a place of honor on the little folding shelf of the cart. But he got it done, and I just had to thank him. I could see how hard it had been. And I felt really bad about the trouble my eggs had given him.