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My father would normally have my return flight from Colorado to New
England arrive on the Thursday before Labor Day weekend, but this
time, perhaps for a better price, it came back on the Wednesday
after. While there would have been little chance to see my friends
before they left for College, this assured it and I arrived in my
home town which looked very much the same. But this time I wouldn't
have the comfort of longtime friends to get me through this year,
just familiar surroundings.
Nothing went wrong with the trip back and nothing had happened to my
bedroom while I was gone. It was like the return home I
should have had the previous year. My first full day
back, I went to the grocery store to request my schedule only to find
the assistant manager flustered as he hadn't planned on me being back
and would 'have
to look into it'. I touched base with Joe, the grocery
store owner, and he said he'd work something out and to come in on
Saturday as my first day. I don't know if it was the assistant
manager or not, but for some strange reason the owner of the local
book store tracked me down the Friday between and offered me a
part-time job. He said he heard I was looking for a job, but I
assured him I already had one. Further, having to dress up every day
and stand behind a counter for less money, versus wearing what I
normally wore while working a variety of tasks full-time left little
chance that I'd consider the book store job.
By the weekend, the lack of my friends was starting to sink in, no
after trip visit with Jonathan to discuss the new games I'd
come across, no bumping into familiar faces at the grocery store...
Well, actually there were a handful of new baggers from
the previous year that were the seasoned baggers of this year and
then, to my surprise, there was Peter. His upperclassman friend had
waited at home a year after his graduation from High School until
Pete graduated so they could join the Army together. Apparently
things hadn't worked out for Pete at boot camp and he was back at the
store's Meat Room while his friend was now trapped alone in the Army
for the coming years. As with the lack of news of his mother, Pete
kept what had happened with the military close to his vest. While an
old familiar face, the slow drift apart in our friendship had left us
as acquaintances at best, but no longer friends.
My Saturday was much like the previous two years of Bagging Saturdays
while Joe worked out my full schedule then handed it to me by that
afternoon. With the store always closed on Sundays, my second day
off had changed from Thursdays, which synced-up with the high
school's late bus schedule, to Tuesdays. My week would thus be six
o'clock at night till two thirty in the morning Monday, Wednesday and
Thursday working the whole time with the night crew. Friday was a
hybrid of four till eleven, half with the baggers until store closed
at eight, then the rest with the night crew, with Saturday a mixed
duty day as well. For both Friday evening and Saturdays, I was like
the chief bagger, where I would fill-in and organize lunch breaks for
the regular baggers and help-out during crunch times. For the rest
of the time on Saturdays I'd be in charge of keeping the dairy case
and beer case stocked. My days periodically helping out with the
Produce Department was now behind me for good.
For the night crew days, I got to meet a whole new group of employees
I hadn't known before. Tasked with unloading trucks of new stock
twice a week to keep the shelves filled, then using up leftover stock
for the nights in between, it was like a little family headed by Geno
and I would work with his second, Nick, in the canned and jarred food
aisle. Effectively each aisle had its own employee to stock it
during the night and Nick's sister to work in the Deli making the
sandwiches and grinders for the next day. There was a young woman
who worked the Health & Beauty section, too, but she often kept
to herself and Joe spent some time in the evenings helping her finish
up, so they could leave sooner in the evening and do something
else. Apparently Joe hadn't been waiting around for my mother
to return from Colorado...
I think I had actually first met Geno when I was age ten and left the
family home on my first night staying with my father after my mother
had moved to the apartment. My dad and Pappy spent the evening
saying derogatory things about mom. I had run from the house and
gone to the store to find my mother, then working on the night crew,
and Geno was the one who eventually responded to my knocking on the
store's windows. That having happened seven years earlier, I
don't know if he remembered me from that one time or not.
He was like the patriarch of the night crew family with Nick the
brother, Amelia the sister and the rest of the guys like various odd
uncles. With the loss of seeing my friends at school every day, I
couldn't have wished for a better replacement group of people. We'd
have dinner break on our own or in pairs on the usual nights, but
have spaghetti nights for a shared dinner on Fridays. Once two in
the morning came, we'd hustle to clear the main floor of boxes and
carts, then half of us would pull out the large push brooms and sweep
with the other half of us bringing out the floor scrubbing machines.
I was assigned a floor scrubbing machine and had fun taming the
throbbing mass as one carefully guided it up and down the aisles. By
two thirty we'd be saying our good nights and I'd then walk across
the hayfield in the dark, and sometimes moon lit nights, to
the house. It was my first experience nighttime nature walking and I
came to like it and would take it up as a hobby in my later years.
With Wednesdays as the lightest workload of the Night Crew, I'd
sometimes do maintenance work at the store with Nick, repairing tile,
reinforcing truck unloading 'dock' areas or patching walls. Once we
had to go to the first branch store and do some repairs and to my
surprise the store I had originally worked at had changed
dramatically. The gas station next door had been bought and the
store merged with its space, adding a whole new wing to the main
floor. The gas pumps were retained and the Meat Room moved to the
new wing along with a new deli section. The old back room which had
held the original meat and produce work areas had been opened-up to
contain a Health & Beauty alcove at the back, with the produce
work area now confined to a closet next to the loading dock. This
was the rare time I didn't help out as much as I should have with the
work as I was enthralled by the changes that had occurred to the
store over the past three years, I just had to explore and
Nick let me. On the drive back to the main store he asked about my
fascination and I told him about my previous years working for the
store chain as a child.
The hardest part of my schedule was the shift from Friday night to
first thing Saturdays. Theoretically, I had eight hours of time to
sleep, but with the routine of going to bed by four in the morning on
the other days, going to bed three hours earlier on one night didn't
work for me and I'd often just get four hours of sleep, then rush to
the store after I got up, sometimes arriving a little bit late. But
unlike the previous year where I was a lethargic lump at the store, I
was back to my focused self this year and proud of my work. For
Saturdays, I'd promptly fill-up the dairy case after Friday evening's
shoppers, then give the baggers their morning break, top-off the beer
case, then give the baggers their lunch break. As the baggers and
myself worked the full day from eight until six, our lunch breaks
needed to be an hour long staggered in two shifts, eleven thirty,
then twelve thirty. Everyone wanted eleven thirty and to convince
half the baggers to wait until the second lunch shift, I bribed them
with trips to my house to play games on my computer during the later
lunch time.
Once, Pete joined us, then I didn't see him again during a lunch
break until one time in May when the rest of the baggers wanted the
second lunch slot for some reason so I came home earlier than I
normally would to find Pete in the house playing games on the
computer during his lunch break without my knowledge. As kids in
Elementary School, I had shown him where the hidden key was for the
back door. It looked like he had remembered over the past decade and
had been coming to my house for some time during his Saturday lunch
breaks to help himself to games. As I got home and noticed this, I
decided to play it cool and just pull up a chair and watch as he
played. Assuming this hadn't been his first time doing this, he must
have been walking the driveway and road back to the grocery store so
I wouldn't see him while I was cutting across the hayfield. When the
lunch break ended, we walked back to the store together. As I had
not noticed previous signs of his visits, he was being respectful
when he was using the computer and I feared that if I complained
about his doing this without asking he'd take it out by damaging my
now three thousand dollar computer system when I wasn't home, as
he had ruined my maternal grandfather's heirloom watch back when we
were kids.
After only my first two months working full-time, Joe called on me
for other needs. Monday mornings became a four hour stretch to
top-off the dairy case and go with him to the liquor store to load up
on wine for the grocery store's wine aisle. For this we'd take his
car, collect a trailer at his home and then load the trailer together
and unload it at the store. This was the most we had worked together
ever and it was nice to visit with him once again on
these little drives. Sometimes when the home delivery driver needed
a day off, I'd be called to come in for a few hours to be the muscle
while the head cashier played the navigator. And once I was tasked
with delivering spare stock from the main store to the new, second
branch store in the southern part of the state. The first store of
the chain to be built from scratch, it was like the new car
equivalent of a grocery store, all bright and shiny. I imagined that
if I stayed in New England, Joe would one day give me my own branch
store to manage. But my heart was with computers, so Colorado it
would be.
By the end of my ten months working full-time, I was briefly assigned
to Amelia in the Deli department at night to make the next day's
sandwiches as the college kids arrived home from College and took
their summertime jobs at the store. Oddly enough, the visit from the
store owner's wife to belittle me was the closest thing I got to an
official send-off from the grocery store. Happening on a Friday, if
it was just the core group I'm sure we would have said our goodbyes
during the spaghetti gathering, but with the expanded work staff, we
had to drop those as they were no longer practical. Instead when
midnight came I quickly went to each core member of the crew in their
aisles and said my final goodbye as they worked, then let myself out
the back door of the store and made my final walk across the
hayfield...
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