Frost

A short essay with no pictures

As part of my exciting Golden Years Program®, I need to work. For money. I like living indoors and eating warm food. A couple of questionable decisions, and a some less than fortuitous bits of chance have all but insured that I will be working until I am no longer able.

I recently started a second part-time job, this one in the Liquor department of a regional grocery chain. I get a few extra dollars a week, and I get to satisfy my need for intense, if brief, customer interaction without the nagging corporate retail insistence on “metrics” - convincing customers that they need a company credit card, and that the expensive item they just plunked down good money for could easily fly into millions of fragments at the worst possible moment, and hey, this would be a really good time to purchase an extended warranty for that thing!

All I have to do is cheerfully greet my customers, help them find things, and check out their orders at one of two registers in the department. I check I.D.s, offer my opinions on potent potables, thank them, and say goodbye until next week, or maybe tomorrow night. I have a lot of regulars. Some of them are truly wonderful people, and I look forward to seeing them every week. A few are schmucks, but roses have thorns.

I treat this, and all my time in retail, as a kind of performance art. When a line begins to build on Friday evening, I yell out, “Next victim, please!” and the next bottle of Buffalo Trace Bourbon or the handful of airline “shooter” bottles comes across my scanner, along with the odd item or three from the grocery side of the store. We laugh, we joke, I check their IDs, I take their money, maybe sell them a lottery ticket, and they go on their way, out into the Friday night of their dreams.

This really isn’t rocket surgery. I’ve been on Point-Of-Sale systems in retail for most of my life, starting at the age of ten at Kroger, operating gigantic National Cash Register machines under the tutelage of my mom, the head cashier. This is also the reason that I can make change and count it back to the customer without looking at the register’s display. Thanks, mom. You were the best.

Last night, I was exchanging small talk with a regular customer at my register, and he asked how much longer I had to work. My shift was just a couple of hours old, and I told him, “Miles to go before I sleep.” He nodded and smiled, but the customer who was being rung up at the register next to mine froze solid upon hearing this.

“What did you say?” he asked.
“Miles to go before I sleep.”
”I remember that!”

I started:
“Whose woods these are I think I know,
But his house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here,
To watch his woods fill up with snow”

You could see the years screaming through his memory as he listened. He looked at me without turning to face me.

“Wow. Do you know the whole thing?”
”Sometimes. I’ve been known to mix up words. It’s not impossible that you might get a Robert Frost / percy Bysshe Shelly mashup. ‘Look on my snowy woods ye mighty and despair.’ ”
”That’s amazing. I remember that from high school.”
”Yep, that where I got it, too.”

As he gathered his twelve-pack of beer and headed for the door, he gave me this smile, as though I had helped him look up an old flame, or triggered a memory, lying long-dormant, of a time he had truly forgotten.

“Thanks, Bud! That was awesome.”

The automatic door opened, and he stepped out into the rainy night. Every now and again you get a chance to prove, maybe with help from Robert Frost from a hundred years ago, that people can be deeper than you might imagine.

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Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening - Robert Frost