We all had our regulars, customers who wanted us to ring them up. The pretty girls had young men lining up to buy a pack of gum, for a chance to talk to them. 😊 The older women tended to get the chatty housewives. I had the "difficult" ones. The people who started arguing with themselves out loud while they were waiting in line, or who wanted to challenge every price, older people who were slow, those were my regulars. I was good with them. The ruder someone was to me, the more slowly I spoke, the more polite I became. Sometimes I did it strictly to piss them off with plausible deniability. But most I saw what was beneath their behaviors, I saw their pain and their fear. Seeing that changed how we interacted, and over time it surprised me how friendly they became simply because I saw them as more than an inconvenience in my day. I saw them as my brothers, my sisters. Just people.
There was one older couple I loved dearly. The first time they came through my line, I saw them signing and got excited: I don't speak much ASL, but enough. They were so surprised that anyone tried to TALK to them, especially the wife, her eyes lit up and she patted my hand and showed me how to sign something better. I saw them once or twice a week for a year. We chatted a little every time they came through, and it lifted me so much, they were so excited, so grateful just that someone was making small talk with them.
I had told them when my last day would be. They were crestfallen that I would be gone. I wondered a lot about their personal lives. Did they have children who had forgotten them? We hadn't had conversations like that in the K-Mart express lane. I know they were lonely.
After I punched out on my last day, I came out of the back room and there was my deaf couple. She was crying. They gave me a gaily wrapped present to open later, and thanked me again and again, no explanation, just thank you, thank you: they each hugged me, and then I saw that he was crying too. I thanked them, and then he said, we will miss you. And they walked away. I watched them leave. They hadn't bought anything. They just came there to bring a present to a pregnant teenager girl who had been forced out of a school, a job, a home. To the world back then, I was a Sinner with a capital S and a cautionary tale. To this couple, I was a friend, and all I did is notice that they were people.
I don't have a conclusion, unless it is this: when all else deserts us, we do not yet walk alone. Maybe your casual smile really mattered to someone today. We never know who we affect: but it is always more than we know.
