The Opposite of Kindness isn’t Cruelty
What I learned today from an 80-year-old stranger.
I stopped at the grocery store this morning. It was raining hard enough that I needed an umbrella to make it from the car to the store. I only needed a few things — bacon and tomatoes for dinner BLTs.
My checker was a young man named Sam who started working at the market on Thursday. In line in front of me was an 80-year-old woman with a lot of questions.
It would have been easy to be annoyed. To switch to a line that moved quicker. Or at all. But I wasn’t in a hurry. I stood there looking at the magazines and listening to the inexperienced checker and the elderly woman go back and forth.
She thought her ice cream was over charged by $1. He wanted to know if she wanted her eggs in a bag.
Then she said something about double bagging because she’d be carrying her groceries back to her apartment. He balanced her eggs on tops of her ice cream, a situation that was obviously a disaster waiting to happen.
It was still raining sheets outside. The woman said that she’d thought about waiting to come to the store, but she needed her arthritis medicine. Her hands were disfigured. Any amount of rain makes them ache, she said.
