“Time has a wonderful way of showing us what really matters.” ~ Unknown
waiting
Shero just isn’t feeling good these days, and all those tests last week only told us what’s not wrong. The question of what is wrong remains. We needed to do something for Father’s Day, and since the original adventure was too much, we scaled it back to our usual Cracker Barrel breakfast and some retail therapy. In all we did this afternoon, we interacted with one nice person. Everybody else treated us like we were a bother. It was so bad that we didn’t leave a tip for the waitress, and I have never done that before. I had to get up to get a refill for myself; that’s just one example. At one of our retail stops, we encountered a clerk who was the quintessential early-twenty-something who probably can’t read cursive or make change, a sad American development that Robyn Terry and I coincidentally discussed at Friday’s ballgame. The exchange went roughly like this:
Shero: “Is this on sale?”
Clerk: “It could be.” (she was expressionless)
Me: “What does that mean?”
Clerk: “If you had an online coupon.” (still expressionless)
Me: “And if we had an online coupon?”
Clerk: “You would show it to me.”
The clerk’s hardened behavior was starting to piss me off. She was not about to tell us how much this elusive coupon would save us or how to find it. I pulled out my phone, by now assuming this was not a “clipped” coupon in an app, like Kroger. Besides, I had nothing to lose if I was wrong because we were coming ever closer to leaving without a purchase.
Me: “Where do we find this coupon?”
Clerk: (gives the website and says nothing more until I find “Coupons” and scroll to “In-store coupon.”) “That’s what I need,” she said, her facial and vocal expressions remaining as blank as if she were a failed computer program. If I could have left without leaving her a tip in protest, I would have.
It was an exhausting exchange, and we were grateful when it was over. We were also ready to go home. Despite being treated like we were a burden to nearly everyone we ran into, we laughed about it all the way home and felt grateful we’d gone through it together, so that collectively, we knew we weren’t crazy. All in all, it was a good day. Strange, but good.
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