I used to live in a large apartment complex. I wasn’t friendly with a lot of the other tenants but easily recognized most of them by sight. The other day I saw one them again. An old woman, almost certainly well past seventy, in the supermarket. She was bagging my groceries.
The recognition gave me an uncomfortable feeling, but it was clear that it made her feel much, much worse because she also recognized me. We had been a kind of peers as joint tenants in that apartment complex. In the market we were something very different.
It wasn’t that she was working for me here. Lots of people in the same community do various jobs for one another. It was the fact that she had obviously and undeniably been reduced to doing something that kids used to do for minimum wage during a summer vacation to get some work experience, and she was reduced to doing it in order to survive.
She hurried my bag filling order. The frozen stuff was mixed in with the canned goods which wasn’t right, and the fruit was on the bottom of the bags in a way that might get it crushed. It was a rush job because she was desperate to move on to the next checkout counter, the one where the groceries of a total stranger waited. For my part I struck up a conversation with the women at the cash register so I didn’t have to look at my bagger.
The old bagging lady reminded me of my mother. On the way home I wondered how she would feel if one of her own neighborhood acquaintances came upon her bagging in a grocery store. It was a thought I didn’t wish to dwell upon.