61
With my educational options apparently coming to a dead end,
perhaps I really could find fulfillment at the grocery store...?
Returning to the grocery store this year featured its own surprises.
Having started at the branch grocery store at the age of eight and
working there part-time until I lost interest soon into age fourteen,
I had found myself irritated that my friends were getting 'official'
jobs at the main grocery store without me. So at age sixteen I
joined them and we all worked together for a year. But for this
second year, that wouldn't be the case.
It turned out Pete had been invited to move up to an assistant role
in the Meat department on Saturdays, with Van being offered a spot
with the Produce department. I got to remain up front with the
baggers, now featuring some new faces from kids that had just turned
sixteen. As the store was going to get their first computer, I
comforted my ego by saying that I'd soon be moving up to help with
the computer. In the meantime a few more people off the street, as
it were, found me up front at the grocery store and asked if I could
help them with their computers. I did, but everything always seemed
to end up being a variation of my data base program: Not very
engaging.
When the computer arrived at the store, it turned out to be a
'turn-key' machine meaning that someone else had set it up and all
the store did with it was turn it on, type in some recent sales
figures, print a report and turn it off. There was no need, or
for that case, no place for me there. With school success
slipping out of my fingers, home becoming just an empty shell, and
now even work seeming to have no future place for me, I was feeling
damn insecure. Jonathan, whose father owned a scientific heavy
hardware business and bought his son the first Trash-80 any of us had
heard of, occasionally did some work for his father when not
otherwise being stuck at home for additional studies at his father's
behest. He showed up at the store to pick up some stuff and I bagged
it for him and offered to carry it out. This was just an excuse
to chat as it was just the one bag as I remember. Then it
occurred to me that I could fill the ranks of the bagging crew with a
familiar face and told Jonathan he should get a job at the store. He
smiled and said he didn't think so, and I tried to sell him on the
idea and he turned down the prospect as we reached his car.
''Oh, you're only able to get a job from your father!'' I
spurt out, then stood there stunned looking at him. He too, stood
there with a mixture of hurt and confusion as he glared back at me.
I realized I had just channeled my mother, seeking a way of demeaning
someone for what they rightly did in life. I silently handed the bag
to Jonathan who took it to place in his car and I turned and walked
away. Why didn't I apologize? I should have apologized
right there and
then. But instead I just kept my distance from Jonathan for a
while...
As with all criticism of other people, it just reveals one's own
weaknesses: I had been the one dependent on my earlier father
figure 'Joe' giving me a job because I knew him already. Who the
hell was I to talk? I fancied afterwards
that Jonathan 'knew I didn't mean it' and thus I didn't have to tell
him. But that was just a load of bull that I consoled myself with
and I've been haunted by this incident to this day. The only
recompense I could make was to ensure I never said something like
that again and the easiest way of doing that was to not even let
these ideas enter my mind... And when they did, I'd find my own
example within myself that I should address.
In reality I still worked with Pete and Van at the front of the
store, bagging, four afternoons a week, so it really wasn't like I
had been left without any
friends to work with. It was just that Saturday when they seemed to
be moving up to in the grocery store hierarchy while I wasn't. A
true example in my face of the lack of a future I appeared to have in
the eyes of the school. So I skipped over the assistant manager
in charge of such things and took advantage of my relationship with
Joe to ask him if I could help with the Produce department one
Saturday morning. He said I could and so I did, when Van showed up
to find me there I said, ''Joe said I could do it today.'' This
seemed to throw him for a loop but he acquiesced, after all Joe was
the owner and even the assistant manager couldn't over rule him.
After doing this for a couple weeks in a row, I arrived the next
Saturday and Van had come in early and was already at the Produce
department. While I was an ass at times, I wasn't a complete hole
and didn't have Joe over rule and put me in his place. Well,
definitely not more than once.
By the turn of the calendar year, I relented and Van let me do every
other weekend at the Produce department for a while. As Spring came,
the Saturday stints for Pete and Van expanded to include Friday
evenings as well. With that expanded role, I withdrew from trading
Saturdays and just accepted my role stuck with the younger baggers.
I labeled myself the 'head bagger' but there was no true difference
in my bagging duties versus the other baggers.
In fact coming to work, and even during the rest of my day, life had
become an ever increasing labor as my limbs felt heavier and took far
more effort to move around. With the longer Friday evenings, there
would be a mid-evening break for dinner, and Saturdays had a lunch
break, and I spent these just hanging out in the Produce department
with Van. We'd chew the fat a bit and I'd sit on a shelf with my
feet dangling and notice that if I touched my chin to my chest it
would make my toes and legs tingle. Where I had once started working
for the grocery chain based on my own initiative and energy, now
I was becoming an immovable lazy lump, sneaking longer
breaks, choosing cashier stands having those customers with fewer
groceries so I wouldn't be needed to carry them out.
If knowing how low one's I.Q. score was might result in them
no longer trying, knowing that I had no future had the same result
in me.
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