Burn, Burn, Burn
Wednesday, the light outdoors was orange and surreal. The sky was
brown. Today (Thursday, because I’m starting this before midnight
here, but I know it won’t be posted until Friday) the smoke/cloud cover
was thicker and there was less light, less color to everything.
No real sunshine reaching the ground for a week or more has put a chill
in the air. I hear a little edge of fear in some people’s voices
when they talk about the wildfires. Many of us have friends and
family in the Interior where those fires are. Many are being
evacuated.
Particulate matter in the air here under the smoke plume leaves cruddy
little deposits in the corners of our eyes, two-leggeds and
four-leggeds alike. I suppose the feathered ones flying around
out there and being quieter than usual have crap in their eyes,
too. Front page of the Anchorage Daily News today had a picture
of a hot shot crew up near Fairbanks, taking a break in camp, looking
smoke-grimed and exhausted. Colorado is sending us 150
firefighters, since they currently have no fires there to fight.
Thanks, guys.
Locally, a ban on open burning led the fireworks stands to voluntarily
take their rockets and other aerial fireworks off the market.
When conversation at the neighborhood general store (at Camp Caswell, a
campground down the highway a few miles) centered on the fires, the
owner told me that people have been coming in asking for campfire wood
and they’ve been saying they don’t have any for sale and telling them
about the burn ban. State troopers and park rangers, who
generally spend a lot of time figuratively putting out fires, have been
doing it literally lately.
It was my night to drive the rehab van to the NA meeting. One of
the women asked me how I was doing in the smoke and all, and I patted
my pocket and said I’d been using my inhaler a lot. She grinned
and lifted her shirt tail, showing me the inhaler tucked into her
waistband…. the sisterhood of the wheeze.
At the end of the meeting, I walked out onto the porch and into the
middle of a silly argument. The sun has been no more than a hazy
red-orange disk for days and daze, and there it was, barely glowing
through the smoke cloud, right where it’s supposed to be that time of
day this time of year. One woman was insisting that it had to be
the moon, that it wasn’t bright enough to be the sun. I added my
voice to those of the others trying to reason with her. The
moon’s in Sagittarius, nearly full, couldn’t be anywhere near the sun,
and besides, I said, “the moon’s not bright enough to show through the
smoke.” Her heated reply was, “I’ve seen the moon plenty of times
in the daylight.” I went and got in the van. Why
bother? Let her have her delusion. I was in too good a mood
to get involved in silly arguments.
Greyfox didn’t open his stand today. He spent the early part of
the day doing his laundry and catching up before the big holiday
weekend with the sort of work that needs to be done to run a business,
but which doesn’t directly result in any income: organizing
stock, calling wholesalers about defective merchandise, etc.
This afternoon when I got there we went to lunch together and to a
couple of thrift shops. At the first stop, he bought five videos
for resale. At the second stop I found a few small items and was
ready to leave when he called my attention to a coat. He said
he’d been looking for one for himself, but this was a woman’s coat and
had, “the finest hand,” he’d ever felt in a coat. He has taught
me that term, my clothes-horse old man. Since knowing him, now I
know that “hand” means the way a garment feels to the touch.
I let him lead me to the coat, I tried it on, and I let him buy it for
me–a grand total of $6.00, for a full-length (to my ankles) dark brown
double-breasted silk trench coat with a zip-in wool liner.
I’m laughing out loud as I write this. He was so pleased to have
found it, and I was at least that pleased to bring it home and put it
in my closet. Right now, I’m back to feeling that triumphant
pleasure, but for a while this evening I was burned up, totally pissed
off, speechless with indignation.
I spent a good portion of my drive home letting the curves in the road
and the jazz on my radio soothe away the slow burn I’d been doing since
the checkout line at the supermarket. I had vented to Greyfox,
who waited for me in the car as I picked up a few items, and he had
said if it had been him, he’d have talked to the manager about
it. That thought hadn’t even occurred to me, although I did
stifle an urge to punch, slap and/or throttle the clerk who checked me
out of there. As it was, she got away with it, the bitch.
Maybe I’d better explain myself….
There were four checkers working. I had only three items, so I
could have gone to the express lane, but it had the longest line.
Two other lanes each had heavily laden carts being emptied and other
big loads waiting behind them, so I took the one where I saw a young
girl pushing an empty cart through and the checker just finishing up
bagging a big order. The girl was with her mother and several
siblings. The kids were asking for various things from those bins
the stores place there to catch the eyes of impulse-buyers.
I could tell they’d been fed before they came to the store, because
there was none of the whiny, irritable, out-of-control behavior I often
see in kids at the supermarket, whose parents apparently don’t know
shit about low blood sugar. These children were asking politely,
and their mother was refusing calmly. I was impressed. The
woman had a plastic card in one hand and a couple of slips of paper in
the other, and I heard her ask the clerk which way she wanted to do
it. This clerk often has a sneer on her face, but it was even
more pronounced than usual as she told the woman that her food stamp
total was six hundred and something.
The daughter who’d been helping to push one of the carts exclaimed at
the total and her mother told her, “It takes a lot to keep you guys
fed.” None of them looked as if they’d been going hungry, but
they all had the soft contours of people on high-carbohydrate
diets: lots of cheap pasta, grains, beans and rice, not so much
protein or fresh vegies.
The mother swiped her food stamp card through the reader and put it
back in her purse. The clerk had laid a big ring of keys on the
scanner and looked annoyed as she told the woman she’d have to swipe
her card again because the scanner had apparently been trying to read
the code-strip on a tag on the key ring and the card-swipe didn’t
take. Calmly, the woman got her card back out and swiped it again.
With nothing better to do, I was just standing there observing her and
her family. She was tall, statuesque, graceful and gracious, in
plain but clean and neat clothing, with understated make-up.
There in that noisy place surrounded by children making unreasonable
requests (though they did so quietly and politely), coping with
inefficiency and rudeness from the clerk, she was unruffled. This
was no placid cow of a woman who didn’t know how to be ruffled.
She was a queen who wouldn’t allow herself to stoop to behavior beneath
her dignity.
The kids were clean, well-groomed, well-behaved and working together to
organize and deal with four cart-loads of groceries. I got the
impression the woman was quite young, and I was trying to get a close
look at her face, to see just how young. I guess she felt my eyes
on her, because she turned and made eye contact. I smiled
sincerely and got a sincere smile in return. I guessed her age at
mid-to-late twenties. Then she had to turn back to the impatient
clerk who was ready to handle the non-food part of the order.
I suppose the slips of paper the young woman had were some sort of cash
vouchers, because she signed them both and the clerk took them and
handed back a few dollars cash. Seeing it, one of the little
girls said, “Oh, can we go to…” and the mother replied, “No,” as she
put the money in her pocket. “This goes in my gas
tank.” As the clerk folded up a yard or more of cash
register tape and handed it over, she said in a snotty tone of voice,
“Today you saved $129.45, Ms. ____.” The girl who had exclaimed
over the total exclaimed again, “One hundred twenty nine!?!” Her
mother smiled at her and said with evident pride, “I know how to shop
the sales.”
The stately young mother and her sweet kids began wheeling away their
month’s groceries and the clerk raised her voice to almost a shout… a
whiny, snide half-shout, dripping sarcasm: “Eenjooy your holiday
weeeekend, Ms._____!” As my few items traveled the conveyer
belt and I shoved my basket through, the clerk raised up on her
tippy-toes and looked past me at the two people in line behind me, who
had apparently seen that this was the shortest, fastest-moving line and
grabbed it. The clerk whined, “Why’s everyone getting in my
line? There are three other checkers working.” She sounded
aggrieved that any of us would dare to expect her to do her job.
Then, as she turned and looked up at me, the woman’s voice changed, and
just as polite as can be she asked me, “how are you?” I answered
sincerely, “grateful that I don’t have a big family,” as I took a last
look at the back of the tall young woman and her helpful little brood,
because I knew that I would never have been able to have remained as
regally unruffled through that experience as she had.
Then the despicable little wretch leaned over toward me and whined,
“but she didn’t have to pay for any of that… it was all food stamps.”
My lips clamped tight, I censored the first response to cross my
mind, “Who the fuck do you think you are!?!” Doing my
best to emulate that calm young single mother, I just stood there
dumbfounded as the sawed-off little fireplug-shaped runt
continued: “She does this every month, and she always comes
through my line.” By then, I’d already thought of three other
things to say to her, none of which would have been proper.
I kept my mouth shut as she went on telling me about how she’d had the
good sense to stop after her two boys were born, and on and on in that
vein. I was remembering those few years when Doug was little and
he and I had been on food stamps and what a mixed blessing it had been,
being able to feed us just barely adequately, but at such a high cost
in time, aggravation and humiliation. I used to refer to those
trips into the welfare office for interviews, “fighting the dragon.”
I know there are many working people in this country who resent paying
taxes to support people like that beautiful young woman and her alert,
intelligent and polite children. I suppose that was part of the
motivation for that sawed-off little Caucasian bitch’s rant, too.
But that wasn’t all. For her, I’m sure that race was an issue as
well. That stately and statuesque young mother was brown, you
see, the color of sweet coffee and cream. And, truth be told, I
think there was some envy involved as well. The runty little
grocery checker never had been and never will be one tenth as
gorgeously, impressively regal as that lady she was dissing, and those
two boys she was bragging on probably weren’t nearly as polite or as
alertly aware as that lovely little brown family, if they’re anything
at all like their mother.

Recent Comments