Plus I Earned 22 Gas Points
By Albert Stern
“A person buying ordinary products in a supermarket is in touch with his deepest emotions.” — John Kenneth Galbraith
So even after living in the Berkshires for more than ten years, I haven’t shed my New Yorker’s habit of shopping today for tonight’s dinner. It’s a New Yorker’s habit because you’re on foot most of the time and can’t carry too much, but also because each day, you can build a wonderful meal around the best and freshest ingredients you might find at your local specialty grocers.
In the Berkshires, however, the daily shopping habit means that I spend a lot of time at the Stop and Shop on Dan Fox Drive in Pittsfield. Which is fine by me — I’ve always liked being in big supermarkets. I’m friendly with the folks who work at the store, and I suppose they notice me puttering around the aisles, in no hurry to leave.
I remember the first time I chatted with the Freezer Guy, and he blurted out something like, “Hey, you’re here all the time. You’re one of us!” Which gave me a warm feeling of belonging but that I think might have been, in retrospect, too much information for the Freezer Guy to have betrayed about his inner life. Ever since, he seems a little uncomfortable when he sees me, sometimes averting his gaze when I approach, no doubt wary that I might someday collar him and start chanting “One of us! One of us! Gooble gobble, one of us!”
There’s also a cashier I like who works the evening shift and who is a really bright guy, maybe someone who didn’t have all the opportunities in life he deserved, maybe someone who somehow got sidetracked along the way, maybe someone who is earning some extra cash at the Stop and Shop after working all day on his masterpiece. If I’m shopping late, I forego the convenience of self-checkout and go to his register. Over time, we’ve established a rapport. We don’t just chat. We talk. About big things. Because he’s willing. And since I usually have 12 items or less in my basket, we get right to them.
One frigid January night, he greeted me by asking how winter was going for me. I answered that I wasn’t so sure. “Ever since they moved the clocks back this year,” I said, “I’ve been feeling strange. Like I’m…I’m — I don’t know how to put it.”
“Let me tell you, man,” he said, “everyone in my family gets like that. The winter blues. The seasonal affective disorder, as they call it. Me too.”
It wasn’t that, I told him. “It’s not the blues. It’s different.”
“Is it the cold?” he asked
“No, I like the cold,” I said. “I was out hiking in the snow this morning when it was 8 degrees. I like the cold.”
He was almost done ringing me up, and I felt it was somehow important to pin it down. I said: “It really is strange. It never bothered me before, the short days, the early evenings. It was just something that happened. But this winter, I’ve felt, I don’t know… dislocated by it. I don’t know if it’s a clock thing, or a darkness thing, or a time thing, or a me thing.”
“Oh, I see what it is,” he said. “It’s a relativity thing. You know, like Einstein used to talk about.”
Okay. Clock — a discrete instrument of measurement. Darkness — space, a structure of the reality that is the gravitational field. Time — an illusion born of our inability to apprehend the gradual process of the universe disordering from a lower entropy to a greater entropy. Me — a point of view.
He was right — it was a relativity thing. Like Einstein used to talk about.
I felt an enormous weight lifting. I felt suddenly unencumbered, more at ease than I’d felt since the clocks reverted to standard time, freer perhaps than I’d felt since the summer solstice. “Yes,” I told him. “That’s it. That’s it exactly. Thank you so much.”
“No problem, man,” he said. “I put the rotisserie chicken in a paper bag because it looked like it was going to drip. Have a good night. See you again soon.”
