Grocery store

Now that I’ve been blogging for a few days I’m getting this little narrative voice chasing me around my days. I’ll be standing in line at the grocery store and it will begin its buzz in my ear, high pitched like a mosquito yet conversational and maybe clever, pressing its narration on the moment. I suspect it’s a wannabe and not the real thing.

The real thing is more just observing things in the quiet with no noisy buzz. Like looking at the guy behind the fish counter I never look at. At the grocery store. He wears this big white fish coat over top of his clothes with the buttons done up at the top but not at the bottom. You might also call it a lab coat. If he worked in a lab it would be a lab coat. It looks like he’s very fat around the middle under the coat but slim in the arms and legs and face. He has soft brown skin and ears that stick out, droopy bleak eyes. He’s younger than I thought.

The problem with looking at people more is they notice. The guy behind the fish counter, his eyes keep hooking back into mine with big question marks jumping out of them of why am I looking at him the way I am? Is there something wrong? Then when I walk away, contemplating the cuts of meat in the meat refrigerators, I can feel his eyes still on me, subtle, impossible for anyone to see like a fine clear fishing line. I’m pretty sure he’s checking out my butt.

Coming out of this I pass an older man. White hair, thick glasses and taking those small, older-person-with-thick-glasses, “I’m looking around and up and feeling very lost” steps. He looks at me and speaks. So I think I must know him. He kind of looks familiar, maybe kind of like a man I know from my son’s baseball league. I say, “Hi,” because I really am the kind of person who forgets people I’m not supposed to, forgets people I should know. It freaks me out I do that. I’m sorry.

But he was just talking to himself. We didn’t know each other. He was saying how he’d forgotten something. I guess the going back because of forgetting went with his being old too, which drifted back to me, what he was saying, as he went by, a stream of misunderstanding becoming understanding, like when the wake hits from a boat that’s passed.

I was thinking about how it’s easier to read the faces of people the same age as you. When I was young an older person’s face was like a mask to me, indecipherable. Now that I am that age I used to think was so old, all the wrinkles and black bags and funny weird moles make sense. They invite. And young people’s faces seem flat and impenetrable. I was thinking about Joan Rivers and all her face lifts to make her look young. I was thinking how it makes her face look empty, sterile and waiting like a neatly folded hospital bed.