The other day I went to the Metro grocery store on Bloor. Whenever I do this I’m always kind of disappointed in myself. It’s not a very good store, and there are all sorts of better, if slightly less convenient options nearby. If I made two or three stops instead of this one, I would have felt that I’d done something toward the good, that I was supporting local business, eating healthier and avoiding factory farmed products, but on this day I was in a tired hurry and let my greater ambitions collapse around me.
Open 24 hours a day, the place is large, impersonal and sloppy. The staff has nothing invested in either the customers or products, and you really do feel like you’re an anonymous cog in a massive, amoral industry. The lighting is economical and unflattering, the music bad and the absence of attentiveness, perhaps even love, is evident. It’s just not a place you really want to be, and as I made my way joylessly through the aisles– getting bumped repeatedly by the same man– I thought about everything that was wrong with it, my mood turning black.
As I waited in the line-up for the cash, I watched as an oozing package of chicken was dragged across the scanner. The cashier, dead-eyed and young, was indifferent, but the university-aged woman who was buying the chicken pointed it out to her, and without making eye contact the cashier sighed and quickly gave the scanner a wipe. She just didn’t care and was responding by rote, like an automaton, and for that shift was clearly not present in her body, never even bothering to look at the people in front of her. Naturally, this irritated me, and when it was my turn I made a point of looking at her directly. She didn’t see me at all. While looking away at some distant horizon, she mumbled the price I owed into her shoulder.
“No,” I said, “you’re speaking too quickly and too much to yourself for me to hear you.”
I’m not really sure if what I said registered, as just repeated herself, still remote and inattentive. I noticed now that she had a library book open, jammed in beside her cash register. Whenever she needed to get away from her life– which appeared to be always while working at the Metro– it was into this world she was escaping. I felt badly for my pissy mood and wanted very much for us to become human to one another, if for just one minute, and asked her what she was reading.
This startled her.
“The Calling,” she said, “it’s about the supernatural.”
“Are you enjoying it?”
“Yeah, it’s pretty good.”
“If you had supernatural powers, what would you do with them?”
“I’d bring my mom back to life,” she said.
