Frogs & Cantaloupe

At Publix, employees are taught to exude, above all else, “premiere customer service.” When I stepped in to a staff position role and began working the customer service desk, there were definitely instances when I had to let go of my own sense of justice and follow my manager's instructions to give the customer whatever they want. 

I have definitely encountered customers who take advantage of this policy as well as the customers who have genuine issue with their groceries or the sometimes confusing weekly sales gimmicks. But until yesterday, I had never had to escort someone out of the store. 

I'm in the midst of an 8-day work marathon and showed up for my 7am-4pm shift yesterday morning. It was a relatively slow start to the morning, as they usually are, and I was monitoring the self-checkout lanes as well as helping the opening bagger with their morning chores of setting up the store for the day. I was moving some of the electric shopping carts outside when someone who had no business coming in the store was making his attempt. 

I don't like being “the heavy.” My one experience trying to be a bouncer at a local bar was a hilarious failure. But I knew what I had to do in this situation. Upon seeing this individual in the foyer, I sprang to action and prevented his entry. 

At 3/4” tall and 2”long, he wasn't very hard to scoop up, although he did resist. But we simply don't allow frogs in the store. This one wanted to know if the rumors were true that I knew Kermit the Frog. I escorted him to a nice patch of grass and told him to try Piggly Wiggly instead. I hear pigs have a preference for frogs. 

In the second half of my workday, I was cashiering all the way down at register 1 near the pharmacy. A line of customers began to form in my lane around 3 o'clock, with an elderly lady at the front. She had two separate orders: one was a container of cut up cantaloupe a friend had asked her to purchase with a $10 bill the friend had given her. 

I rang up the cantaloupe after the lady paid for her own groceries and she began frantically rummaging through her purse, unable to find the $10 bill that her friend had given her. She was growing intensely frustrated and was apologizing to me and the customers behind her, none of whom were visibly agitated. I think we were all hoping she'd find it and I tried reassuring her that she could take all the time she needed. 

After a minute or so, her emotional state intensified, she excused herself from the line and moved her cart to the front of the store and continued looking. That's when I heard a voice call me from the back of the line and saw a face I know all too well. 

We have several regular Instacart shoppers that we employees see on a regular basis. Some we appreciate because they know what they're doing and make the process easy for everybody. There are also some we dread because they do the exact opposite. Then there are special cases. 

Chris is a special case. In his late 50's, knee-high socks and shorts, slicked back salt-and-pepper hair, thick black frames, he is usually positioned between two shopping carts because he'll shop multiple orders at a time. He is the epitome of persnickety. 

When I first encountered Chris, he was the one I dreaded to see coming the most. He is often curt, rude and abrupt to criticize any employee who is unfamiliar with his routine or does not do something to his liking. I know there are employees who actively avoid bagging his groceries or avoid him altogether. Others don't take him seriously and try to needle him. 

Here are his three rules for how the groceries are to be bagged: 1)Everything in a bag (including gallon milk jugs, which we are not supposed to bag per store policy), 2) No bag filled too heavy 3) All liquids standing up (this one is mostly in regard to some baggers who'll lay down a bottle of wine in a bag)

Early on, after my first experience with Chris, I did try to avoid him. Over time, I just got used to his usual liturgy and began reciting it to the bagger when he'd come through my line, which he actually seemed to appreciate. Now I can needle him a bit and he does seem to peek through a tough exterior when I do. But mostly, I just give him a wide berth.

So, when this sweet old lady became frustrated and excused herself from my checkout line, the face I saw in back of the line was Chris'. He motioned for me to come around to the back of my line and gave me a $20. 

I rang up the cantaloupe, put it in a plastic shopping bag and got the lady's attention. “What?! How did you do that?” I told her it was magic and a “Good Samaritan.” She asked for my name and thanked me and  left the store with her groceries. 

About 30 minutes later, I got a tap on my shoulder and there was this sweet lady holding a card with my name on it. She gave it to me and thanked me again and I gave her a hug, telling her she didn't need to do that. When I had a slow moment in the line, I opened the card and there was a $5 bill to reimburse for the cantaloupe Well, I knew what I had to do: I had to find Chris. 

I suppose I could have just kept that $5 and said nothing and Chris would have been none the wiser. But I know whose face I have to look at in the mirror everyday and that wasn't going to happen. 

He came through my line once more before my shift ended and I handed him the card. “This has my name on it but it should be for you.” 

“Please tell me there's no money in that card,” he said. 

I told him there was. He took out the card, opened it and said, “Take that. I don't want it. It's not about the money. There have been plenty of times when I saw something that needed to be done and I didn't do anything. But I wasn't going to keep that lady from getting her fruit.”

It was like watching the transformation of Ebeneezer Scrooge or The Grinch: that moment when you see a little humanity peek through the cracks of a harsh and brittle misanthrope. 

Our society is being fueled right now by filtered and targeted divisiveness. I am thankful that I can still see a full spectrum of human interactions at the grocery store. Just do what the good book says and love your neighbor as you would yourself. Get off your phones. Go buy some cantaloupe or buy some for your neighbor.

Remembering Sonja Sellers

 Seems like all I write about now are customer encounters at the grocery store and deaths. I'm afraid this post falls in the latter category. I received word through my friend and fellow art student, Anna, that our grade school art teacher, Sonja Sellers passed away last week.

I remember quite vividly the several days Sonja Sellers visited to instruct my class on how to better use our crayons and watercolors. She mentioned that she taught art lessons after school at her home studio for interested students, which I was. It wasn't long before my parents were buying me a tackle box to store my oil paints, bushes and pastel chalks as well as canvases of various sizes that I would tote when I was dropped off at her doorstep once a week.

I remember about 6 students of different ages at any given time, set up at easels in a room that was an add-on to the Sellers' house. There was a room in the back of this studio with a sink and a  big can of turpentine used to clean our brushes at the end of a day's painting. We could also use that room as a dark room to project and trace images onto a blank canvas.

While painting seascapes, I learned how to mix and apply gradations of color in the sky and the foreground. I learned about “halos,” her term for the little unpainted specks on a canvas that were never to be overlooked. Pulling out my old canvases was a step back into my past to look at my handiwork, which also had Sonja Sellers' handiwork all over it. Her corrective brushstrokes were still very evident to me.

In one stormy seascape, which hung above my grandmother's television set for years, there is a frothy, foamy wave crashing near the shore. I will never forget watching Sonja Sellers' load up the bristles of a toothbrush with white paint and using her thumbnail to flick the paint onto the canvas to create the effect of sea spray. Magic. 

I had two unwavering collectors of my work: my grandmother, who bought that stormy seascape -the only piece ever exhibited (at the local bank), and my mother who proudly hangs several of my originals on the walls of my parents' home. I enjoyed painting animals, the images of which came from my father's National Wildlife magazines. But what I really enjoyed painting were, as if you couldn't guess, Muppets. I literally rendered a still from “The Great Muppet Caper” in oils. My mother preferred the seascapes.

While excavating original works I'd made under Sonja Sellers' (I always have to use both names for some reason) tutelage from under my parents' guest room bed, I discovered that my memory had been playing tricks on me for quite some time. This is when I also realized the importance of dating everything alongside a signature. I thought I remembered her class visit happening in my 6th grade year. But when we started pulling out the old canvases and drawings, it seems she came during my 5th grade year, making that particular grade a seminal one for determining my life's course.

In Betty Harris' 5th grade class, following the positive response from my improvised presentation on the Gold Rush of 1849 with puppets, I knew I wanted to be a puppeteer. Also that year, an an effort to avoid Physical Education, I joined the school band, which would later have even more humiliating repercussions than the ones I imagined for P.E.. The upshot came years later when I traded that trombone, minus the mouthpiece which had been removed by an assistant band director who insisted I couldn't march and play at the same time, for my first guitar. That year I also started taking lessons from Sonja Sellers, which is where I first met Anna, who became one of my closest friends through our high school years and into our first years at Troy University. It's a friendship that's, thankfully, endured.

Eventually, after maybe two school years' worth of lessons, I had to give them up because symphonic band practice happened on the same day as my art lessons, leaving little gap time to get from one to another. My parents had purchased the trombone I “played” in band, which was the bigger investment, so my sessions with Sonja Sellers came to an end.

I hated giving up those art lessons. They were such a welcome respite from the social anxiety I experienced in school. She created a space were her pupils could create and learn in a non-judgmental environment. That said, I was not a gifted painter (I was a worse trombonist). But now I realize that learning how to do something is sometimes just about the learning process and picking up lessons which become evident at a later time. I realize that the subject matter of what I painted wasn't nearly as important as learning the skill and techniques of painting. I'm more informed as a creator now because of the things Sonja Sellers was teaching me (or trying to) in those lessons and for that, I am so very thankful to her.