Today I drove out to the Avenues to shop at Andronico’s — my favorite grocery store, despite the sky-high prices. An adorable little old lady, her fluffy silver-white hair balanced atop a quilted beige cloth coat, had begun her shopping around the same time as I arrived. Cute or not, she was a very slow-moving little old lady, not just in her glacial walking speed but also in her shopping style.
She managed to be either right in front of me or precisely where I wanted to be during the whole of our mutual stay at Andronico’s. I had a specific list of items and thus was moving around the store, rather than plodding up and down the aisles. There was no logical reason for her to continue to intersect me.
But there she was. I would turn my cart into an aisle and there she was, directly in front of me, quietly removing jars of this & that from the shelves, examining them intently, then putting them back — while I stood there waiting for her to move on, since the narrow aisle precluded going past her. Besides, this is Andronico’s, where one is polite to one’s fellow shoppers, and not that fetid hell realm, the Market & Church Safeway where insensitivity and rudeness are de rigeur survival mechanisms.
I needed bread, to be quite precise a country Levain produced by a local artisan bakery. And there she was, gamely looking through the various white-paper-bags of pugliese, olive, rosemary, whole-grain, sour batards, sweet batards, baguettes, levain, and the like. And she was smack dab in front of the country Levain I wanted. So I waited for her to finish examining the breads. That took a while.
I went for produce, in particular melons. There she was, reading through her little shopping list while standing right in front of the melon bins, arranged precisely so her shopping cart blocked whatever area she herself did not block. So I waited for her to move on.
Down the aisle to the pasta sauces. There she was, ahead of me this time, moving along but infinitesimally slowly, and once again the aisle was just a bit too narrow to attempt a pass. So I crawled down the aisle behind her, practicing my walking meditation, until I arrived eventually at my quarry.
I had made it through my shopping list and went through checkout. She had made it through a different checkstand just a few seconds before me — precisely on schedule to be walking out the door right in front of me. So I left the store at the approximate speed of a sedated paramecium, trying to match my steps to her oh-so-gradual, oh-so-tiny steps.
I had found the whole thing amusing rather than aggravating, to tell the truth, but I was glad to see the last of that little quilted beige coat with its pouffe of silver-white hair.
Alas the parking lot was gridlocked with the noontime crush of SUV housewives. Eventually I made it to the exit, whence to turn right on 15th Avenue then right again on Lincoln Way and head east for home. But there was a car in front of me, a powder-blue Buick with its right blinker blinking, the driver apparently ensuring that there wasn’t another car on 15th Avenue for at least several blocks before making the right turn out of the parking lot. I could make out her left arm — encased in a quilted beige cloth coat.
We left the parking lot, her in the lead and me following, at a leisurely, deliberate snail’s pace, as she turned right onto 15th Avenue.
And then she gunned that Buick and went roaring up 15th Avenue to Lincoln as though she had yanked the Warp Drive lever. She made a quick, deft left turn on Lincoln and shot away, a powder-blue comet streaking westwards. But her influence yet lingered as I made a gentle, slow right turn onto Lincoln and my eastward journey home. Then, in honor of my little friend, I gunned it and made it to the next traffic light in jig time.