60 Cent

I was at the grocery store this week with my little cloth shopping bags.  These are de rigueur in the New City.  You may drive 10 miles to the store in your SUV and buy a roast that required more energy to produce than five or six hundred paper bags, but you may not forget your little cloth bag.  The store, no doubt out of the goodness of its little heart, reminds you on the cart corrals: "Don't forget your bag!"  I didn't.


Anyway, I had several 2 liter bottles of soda which I told the clerk that she could leave in the cart.  I prefer struggling with them individually.  Occasionally I drop one and cause a big mess because that's part of my allure as a husband.


"Do you want me to bag this?" she said, indicating a half gallon jug of milk.


"No, that's OK," I replied.  "But I will need the cat litter bagged."


"All right," she said, glancing away.  The cat litter was in a bag approximately 5 times as large as the grocery bag.  The only way it would fit in there would be if you burnt all of the cat litter in a very hot fire, collected the ashes, threw half of the ashes away, then put them in the grocery bag.  The cat litter wasn't going in my little cloth bag.


"I'm kidding, of course," I said, feeling a little bad.


She looked at me.  "I was pretty sure you were but you wouldn't believe the things people ask me to do."


Really?  I should have inquired as to what exactly people were asking her to do.  I think I was afraid of what the answer might be.


We chatted a minute as she finished up.  I watched as she rummaged around in her register and then scanned a coupon, money coming off my bill.


She leaned over.  "I gave you the senior citizen coupon on the milk since you're funny," she said.


"Funny ha ha, or funny peculiar?" I asked.  Maybe she thought I was a senior citizen, what with the wrinkles and gray hair and everything.


How much effort does it take to make a little effort with people, to acknowledge that they exist?  Pretty much, apparently.