Saturday Special: Serendipity in the Produce Department

Sometimes if feels like entering Mordor as I push the cart into the haphazard maze of the produce department. Today's jaunt to load up on goodies for Memorial Day held a pleasant surprise for me.

Mistress of the Feast

Our local Walmart usually has an army of employees filling orders for those shopping online for pickup. Those people no longer face the mosh pit that is grocery stores. I continue to walk the miles of aisles and count it as my weekly exercise binge. My readers with mobility issues will fully understand the onus of this otherwise mundane weekly chore.

I used to love grocery shopping. It appealed to my hunter-gather heritage somewhere back in the ancient wilds of northwestern Europe. In a casual quip to another customer shopping with her husband in tow, I said, "grocery shopping is the only time I can give in to impulse buying without guilt." Both of us winked at our common philosophy as her husband chewed on that idea.

Such little contacts between shoppers are exactly what takes the drudgery out of these forays. Making eye as well as verbal contact was quashed by the COVID lockdown and is just recently beginning to return.

Today, Serendipity enhanced my trip to the store with a memory jog. As I approached the fruit counter where the produce manager dipped into her boxes of fresh grapes, she looked at me and sighed.

"We got 250 pallets of food last night and there are only three of us to get it out."

That could be bad news for fresh foods, but it seems that between the order fillers and stockers, Walmart is always a beehive of activity. I'm not going to plumb the depths of how and from whom Walmart gets their goods, but they've made this inflationary time much easier on the budget than my old grocery right now. Significant difference on basic stuff.

But I digress.

I sympathized with her plight and said, "All that food you're stacking will be eaten this weekend with everyone camping and bar-be-cuing. It'll be gone in no time. And YOU are the Mistress of the Feast."

For a moment, I thought I saw her eyes moisten as she smiled. "Thank you. I needed to hear that today. In fact, I think someone else said that to me once."

"Oh, well, a couple of years ago on Thanksgiving morning, I saw a woman like you stocking the produce. She looked really tired and frustrated, so I said that to her."

The manager's face lit up with recognition. "That was you, wasn't it? I was that woman. You made my day. In fact, I wrote about it on Facebook. I wrote, 'that woman knows me. She knows I'm the one who cooks all the meals for everybody, even all the holiday meals. I AM the Mistress of the Feast.'"

“And just the other day, I was thinking about that incident and wondered if you got angry with me. You had a funny look on your face."

"It was because I was surprised. You knew what I was all about."

At that, we came together in a huge hug. I couldn't believe the coincidence. But such is life in a small town, even one with a big box store. The employee turn-over wasn't as fast as I thought it was. And as I continue to shop there, more of the employees take on that familiar look to them.

My new friend said to me as she pulled away from our hug, "when you said that to me, I knew I was in the right community. These are my people. They know who I am."

If you enjoyed this story, feel free to explore more poems, stories, and essays in the Ring Around the Basin Archive. And please tell me what you think in the comments. Let’s start a conversation.