The Time Capsule | Roy Marshall
I needed only a few buns.
While passing through produce, I noticed a young girl – probably under 10 years old – eating grapes from one of the bags offered for sale. A store employee was nearby. I’m sure he saw her, but let it pass.
A few minutes later, I was in line behind a lady chatting on a cell phone. She was removing twice as many items from her cart as were allowed in the express lane. The number kept changing as the grape-snatching little girl, presumably her daughter, was continuously grabbing candy bars and gumdrops, then changing her mind, putting them someplace other than where she got them, and running off to one aisle or another for a different treat.
Something on the phone was especially funny, but the lady stopped laughing long enough to ask the clerk for cigarettes. The little girl dashed up with ice cream, was told to take it back and get a different kind. The girl protested, and the lady resumed her phone conversation while rummaging her purse for cash.
The clerk kept smiling, the lady found her money, and the little girl returned to pout that there wasn’t the requested kind of ice cream.
Over the holiday weekend, the store was busy. Three or four people were in line behind me. The clerk called for another checker.
I left the line, returned buns to the shelf, put the cart away, and went home. At our family picnic, burgers and hot dogs were served with plain white bread, tortillas, and week-old bagels.
Age may be distorting my impressions, but it seems boorishness is becoming more common.
There was a time when I had an after-school job carrying groceries and cleaning aisles. I remember that, and remember the kids of my time understood their place.
They did things they shouldn’t have; they fell out of trees, rode bicycles without helmets and hurled themselves onto an out-of-control sled going over the suicidal precipice known as “Dare Devil’s Hill.” They played in the street and not on computers, drank water from a well pump instead of a bottle, then passed the cup around. They knew what it was to be hit between the eyes by a snowball. They made their own slingshots and used them, tipped outhouses on Halloween, and thought raiding a watermelon patch was a rite of passage.
Kids then were hardly angels, but they understood appropriate behavior in public places and knew from experience what consequences – real consequences – were. I was there, and if youngsters of that time and place had acted in a store the way some of the spoiled, out-of-control little monsters do today, I’d remember. I don’t – because they didn’t.
What I do remember are Aunt Mollie and Aunt Madrid experiencing delays at the checkout counter because they kept insisting someone else go first. I remember the day Mrs. Starr, a widow with a badly humped back and a meager income, walked four blocks back to the store because when I bagged her groceries I put in a can of corn that should have gone to Zeta Willoughby, who was next in line.
Members of every generation suspect the next one doesn’t measure up. They may someday be right.
Roy Marshall is a local historian and columnist for the Red Oak Express. He can be contacted at news@redoakexpress.com.