The two women in the grocery store checkout line were buying pudding packs. Lots of them.
“We’ll eat these first,” said the younger of the two women reassuringly. The older woman seemed frail. From a pocket, she pulled a tissue and dabbed her nose. The other woman took out a bottle of hand sanitizer and squeezed it into her hands. She rubbed them together.
The woman slowly turned her head and looked up at me. The older woman.
I was standing there with a cart full of groceries. This was the weekend before things got really “interesting.” Before you couldn’t find chicken or toilet paper or stuff you never thought stores would run out of. Or at least, not when there wasn’t a tropical cyclone spinning off the Florida coast.
That weekend, things were only slightly off-kilter. Slightly hushed. Slightly concerned. The reality wasn’t setting in yet. People who went to the grocery store that early in the morning looked at each other in ways I haven’t fully come to terms with. They jumped when they heard someone cough. They walked the aisles solemnly. They paused near the cleaning supplies or the respiratory relief pills and stared. Did they need them? Were they overreacting?
Sometimes they just looked at each other, like they didn’t know what to say.
Like the older woman dabbing her nose.
I don’t know why it stuck. Things about people sometimes do that to me. Maybe her eyes? There was something about her eyes? I couldn’t figure it out.
What was she thinking?
Was she worried about the coronavirus? She must have been. Of course she was. Or worried about me? Maybe I was too close to her in the aisle. No doubt she had been warned. Keep your distance!
Or maybe – and this troubled me the most – maybe she thought I was worried about HER? She dabbed her nose. Clearly I saw that. That’s when she looked up at me. Did she wonder if I thought SHE was sick? That I didn’t want to be too near to HER? What a terrible thing for a person to wonder. I hope that wasn’t it.
I wanted to say something. The more I think about it, I wish I had. Something reassuring. Or cute. Or funny. But I wasn’t quick enough, and got hung up trying to figure out that look – her worried eyes.
I think of my good friend Hunter Camp. He’s the pastor at Memorial Presbyterian in downtown St. Augustine. Hunter would have known what to do. He has what I can only describe as “healing eyes.” I don’t know what it is, and I’ll probably embarrass him by writing this, but oh well. What’s he going to do? Kick me out.
Whatever it is, you come to him with a problem – some trouble in the world – and his eyes say it all: “It’s OK, brother. I’m here. It’ll be all right.” I don’t know how he does it. Maybe they teach it in seminary school? Or it’s in his genes?
But it’s equal parts comfort and understanding. Maybe most of all, compassion.
Standing in the grocery store line, I wished I could have been like that. Was that all she needed? We need a little more of that right now. It’s getting crazy out there. My wife was at the grocery store and someone cut her and a couple other people off while racing to pay for a sub. My wife is from Long Island, and she said the New Yorker in her wanted to “let loose!” But something else told her to just let it go. Maybe he needs to get out of here more than you do. That’s compassion.
None of us know what tomorrow brings. Things are moving so quickly now. The stock market’s in shambles. People are worried about their kids. Their jobs. Their livelihoods. Their retirement. It’s moved beyond just health. Everything has us worried. We’ve never seen anything like this before. Not hurricanes. Not Sept. 11. Not past recessions. Everything seemed to go bad all at once, and we don’t know what it means for the future. In the blink of an eye everything changed. And here we are, just … worried.
And I keep thinking back to that woman in the grocery store line. Keep wanting a do-over. A chance to try it again. Just to smile. A real, genuine smile. Something that might help tell her, “It’s OK, sister. I’m here. It’ll be all right.”