Two nights ago, I was standing in line at Food Basics, basking in the warm beauty of a large grocery store. Don DeLillo expressed this beauty eloquently in White Noise (something about waves and radiation) but I’ll just say this much: I like the drowsy hum of a closing grocery store, okay?
I snapped out of my moment of peace to notice a few things about my environment:
Hey, this is the fast lane - 8 items maximum.
Hey, I’m just holding a single loaf of Dempster’s Whole Wheat.
Hey, that teenage girl up in front has upwards of twenty items!
Taking a glance at the annoyed people in line, and at the obviously pained cashier, probably barred by store policy from interfering, I knew what I had to do. With steady, even steps, I approached the teenager.
“Twenty-one items.”
“Huh?”
“You’ve got twenty-one items.”
“So?”
Wordlessly, I raised my arm. It stretched upwards in it’s new position, much like a signal fire, pointing at a lightly glowing green sign. It read:
“Fast Lane
1 to 8 Items”
She craned her neck, squinted to read the sign, and then became rather flustered.
“Yeah, well, I’m, like, in a hurry.”
“So are the people behind you, most likely.”
“There aren’t any other cashiers here!”
“I, having 20/20 vision, can plainly see that there is, in fact, another lane open - the one right next to us. Nice try, though.”
At this point, the cashier stopped fiddling with the girl’s seemingly unscannable milk, and turned to us. After several moments of numb silence, the girl’s expression suddenly changed.
“Fuck you,” she stage-whispered, and then stalked off to the next lane, as did the man behind her, who had a relatively modest twelve items.
“Kiss kiss,” I called back to her, just before returning to the last spot in the Fast Lane line, satisfied, bread in hand.
