Hot Dog!

1

I was at the end of eighteen years of age and working my very last day at the family owned grocery store across the hayfield from my childhood home. Actually, it was my very last night as I was a part of the night shift. After leaving High School, I returned to the grocery store to take a full-time job for a year and save up my money in anticipation of my move out west. When I arrived at the store office that previous Fall they hadn't been expecting me to return after High School and the owner scrambled to find a way to fit me into the schedule. As a result I ended up with a hodgepodge of hours, three and a half nights a week working with the night crew overlapping with one and a half days working the day shift. Upon getting the schedule and showing it to some of my coworkers, one of them said I should demand a better schedule or quit in protest. But I decided to make it work. Now at the end of this work year, I had apparently over stayed my time by the start of the next Summer as the rest of my peers finished their first year of College and returned to the store to take their summertime place in the night crew stocking shelves. So I had been moved to the deli department for my last two weeks to help ready sandwiches and grinders for the following day. Once I finished working there, after this final night, I would then take a few days to pack up my things and start my long drive from New England to Colorado and 'truly begin' my adult life. While I had spent the year shoulder to shoulder with 'Nick' of the night crew, I was now ending that year working with his sister, 'Amelia', in the deli.

As a surprise for that time of night, the store owner's wife, 'Dorcus', showed up in the back room just to see me. She said she had heard that it was my last day before moving out west and I confirmed that it was... And so she scathed me with a tirade of put downs mostly centering on how pathetic and worthless I was and how I would never amount to anything more than 'just a Hot Dog vendor.' I wish I could remember it word for word or had written it down at the time as it was a creative, jaw-dropping string of such remarks. And then she left.

There was a silent pause as I was stunned. Amelia asked me what that had been about and I told her I had no clue. My mind raced through my entire life trying to find any moment when the owner's wife and I had shared a bad time that would justify any bit of this brooding load of hate she had attempted to drop on me. I had first met her when my mother had me befriend her son during kindergarten. Back then, the owner and his wife lived at an apartment that made-up the second floor of the grocery store and, by my early elementary school years, we would gather in front of it to board the school bus and I'd see her in passing then or one of the few times I would visit her son at the apartment and in later years at their new house. By my teenaged years working at the grocery store afternoons and Saturdays I would occasionally bag and carry out her groceries to the car and in all that time couldn't find any moment in my experiences with her where we had shared a bad moment or unpleasant word.

I took this dressing down on my last night with humor as it had been so out of the blue and so over the top I couldn't see any connection it had with my life. Amelia wasn't satisfied, though, and told me that surely there must have been some reason for it. I racked my brain some more and then it occurred to me that perhaps she had said all that to get back at my mother. I told Amelia that my mother had an affair with the store owner, 'Joe', many years earlier and that the only thing I could guess was she was dumping on me as her last chance to lash out at my mother. The joke was, had she known the way my mother talked to me about myself over the years, Dorcus's words paled in comparison into a nearly gentle touch.

If I was to pick-out an accurate disparaging adjective for myself it would be 'clueless,' as there have been so many times in my life where I would get these bewildering moments of other people's thoughts of me and truly not have a clue where they came from. During my final year of High School I found that I was in the notables list as 'the sneakiest.' Why? I hadn't a clue and my friends weren't giving me any explanation until one friend, in a confessional phone call to me a few years later, explained it to me by using a phrase which I didn't come to understand until the meaning was revealed in a television show I saw yet more years later.

Thus much of my life I feel I've lived in retrospect. Things happen and I don't come to understand them until years later, often when I'm just pondering my life at random moments, or other times when someone has to actually explain it to me after the fact. I don't know if this is how we all live our lives or if I'm just slower on the uptake in this regard than most everyone else.

One such point of cluelessness was it took me decades before I came to realize that communication between people is about more than passing on information, its about validation. Or invalidation in Dorcus's case. In fact I'd say the majority of communication between people is in this validation/invalidation vein, with passing on factual information a distant second. Perhaps that's why there's been such a gap in my life as I would always seek the factual bits in what people would say to me when in reality they were just trying to make me feel good or bad about myself and I was just too unwitting to understand that. On reflection, this cluelessness has been a beneficial shield for me as the emotional portion of negative feedback would most often go right over my head as my mind would scrabble in search of corresponding facts.

As the store owner's wife, and in fact the store owner himself, are long dead as I write this I guess I will never truly know what was behind her words that day.

But thinking of them still brings a laugh...!

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