Lessons Learned from a Supermarket Aisle

A week after I began volunteering at a homeless shelter, I shook hands with a young man who was born addicted to crack from a mother who sold her body to a father he would never know. Another few weeks and I met a young woman who was left completely on her own because her father couldn’t handle the fact that his wife was dying of cancer. He disappeared and six months later her mother was dead. This girl was only 13 years old.

What challenge had I faced that could ever compare to this?

Rewind twenty something years and there I am in the health and beauty aisle of the local supermarket. I’m a menace, I’m flashing gapped tooth grins at every passerby, I have undiagnosed ADHD. I’m sprinting like an antelope and doing knee-slides in my dirtied jeans across the lustrous lacquered floors. “Whose kid is that?” old ladies grumble as they twist up their faces at me and then scowl at my mother.

But mom’s cool as a cucumber. She’s going about her motherly duties, unperturbed by my complete disregard for society’s norms. Most of my savagery is a not-so-subtle cry for attention and she isn’t giving me (or those scowling old ladies) the satisfaction.

She’s focused instead on figuring out if the 8 oz. can of condensed milk is a better buy than the 12 oz. can — this is adult stuff and I want no part of it. Off I go again, sprinting out ahead of her, drifting like a rally car around the corner of our aisle and into the next to see what treasures it holds.

That’s when I see it. Jutting out from the third row of shelves is a brick-shaped red box with a blinking red light. It’s an automatic coupon dispenser. I stop dead in my tracks. Mom freakin’ loves coupons, the voice in my head whispers. My pupils dilate. The little heart in my six year old ribcage is pounding as if it’s begging to be let out. I will get mom a coupon and she will love the coupon and she will love me. I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.

I’m in an all out mad dash, gunning straight for the dispenser, drawn to it as if I was Odysseus and it was the Sirens. 50 feet, 30 feet, 10 feet, knee-slide! As I glide on my knees virtually frictionless across that white-tiled supermarket floor, the fingers at the end of my outstretched arm grasp around the coupon protruding from the coupon dispenser. I’m still sliding but now the coupon is in my hand, waving in the air like the flag of victory, high above my head like the Olympic torch.

In one fluid motion I spring to my feet, screech to a halt and begin running back in the direction I came from.

Mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom, mom!

Coupon, coupon, coupon, coupon, coupon, coupon, coupon!

Love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love!

There is nothing else on my mind.

I knock a box of Cheez Its and some ramen noodles out of a middle-aged man’s hand basket as I round the corner into the aisle where my mom’s deciding between cans of condensed milk. The middle-aged man almost leaps clean out of his shoes, flabbergasted from only having seen a streak of messy hair brown hair fly past him with a whoooooosh!

“MOOOOOOMMM!!!” I’m standing proud as a statue. My eyes are closed and my hand is held high like I just pulled the sword from the stone, only the sword is a coupon and I’m just a kid.

“COOUUUUPPPPOOOONNN!!!”

The inside of my shut eyelids are glowing a cool yellow from the fluorescent lights that illuminate the supermarket aisles. My ears are bent in the direction that my mother’s voice should be coming from. I’m still in my King Arthur pose, waiting, waiting, waiting for her to tell me I did a good thing.

“Marge to aisle six for customer assistance, Marge to aisle six.”

… That’s not my mom …

It takes my eyes a moment to adjust after opening them. There’s an old man where my mother should be, holding a can of condensed milk in his wrinkled hands and staring at me confusedly. He shakes his head slowly, puts the milk back on the shelf and starts shuffling off away from me down the aisle.

My hand is still above my head and without knowing it, I’ve let go of the coupon. It flutters down, down, down to the aisle floor. A young woman walking past me steps on it, leaving a shoeprint on its face.

I’ve lost my mom.

My racing heart slows to a stop and so does time in the stalled world around me.

MOTHER.

There is nothing else in the world.

The supermarket’s 12-foot shelves and the walls that surround them sink slowly like collapsing towers into the ground. All that’s left is a limitless expanse.

I am a lost boy. The weight of a thousand lifetimes of loneliness crushes my body. I am pulverized into dust.

MOOOOOOOOOOTTTTHHHHEEEEEEEEEEEEERRRR!!!

The voice in my head cries out but not even I can hear it anymore.

I’ve lost my mother.

* * *

It may have only been 30 or 40 seconds before my mother rounded the corner, cool as a cucumber just like she always was. But in that 30 or 40 seconds my entire life came crashing down around me — in that 30 or 40 seconds love was ripped from my clutches.

Some kids never get it back. Some kids are left in that vast, unfamiliar, unnavigable expanse to fend for themselves.

No kids deserve to feel that way for more than 30 or 40 seconds.