Hold the mirror to their face

It was Monday and I was shopping at Food Lion once again. This was partly because I had hoped that after my recent article about grocery shopping, where I mentioned that I usually go there on Mondays, fans would be waiting! The net result was that about five people mentioned the article and said in a joking manner, "I have an idea for a future article" and/or "I want it chipped," referring to my previous comment about my husband Jeff liking his deli ham that way.

Then I came upon an older lady pushing a cart slowly near the deli. I had noticed favorably that none of the deli workers had on shower caps anymore. Maybe my article had helped their plight? Instead, they wore either cute Food Lion caps or turbans in bright cloth.

To get back to the woman, she was looking at me quizzically. Sometimes people I knew from kindergarten, wearing hats and sunglasses, want me to guess who they are, but she said, "I know who you are, but I can't remember your name!" This couldn't be an admirer of my art or writing after all, but it slowly came to me who she was. She was one of three sisters, one of whom I had a bone to pick with, and now this one had surfaced.

Her other sister had moved my whole display on a card table into the sun at a craft show and moved hers into the shade, while I was dealing with an angry hot dog vendor who had made me drive into a ditch at dawn, hogging the road in the early morning light and spilling mustard and ketchup everywhere in his wake. The nerve of both parties!

Anyhow, this sister said she used to be my mother's seamstress. She said my mother had one arm shorter than the other and one leg shorter too, and her clothes had to be altered accordingly. I didn't know about my mother’s shorter leg, but I guess her seamstress would know. Yes, I did know about my mother's shorter arm, but she dealt with it very well. Sometimes, perhaps, too well! She could pick up unruly students by their ears and pinch their necks until they surrendered. She could also play the piano very well.

I then recalled a couple of incidents, one only a couple of days ago. Jeff has this habit of testing people out, a litmus test of character as he calls it, by asking them out to dinner. I myself would not attempt this, as I know what the usual outcome will be and don't really care one way or the other to go out to dinner with happenstance acquaintances, or I don't want to know the probable outcome of their answer. If you approached this survey scientifically, you would probably find only one in three people would care enough to go through with this. People seem to form impenetrable cliques these days, like tribes, so you are either in their tribe or you are out.

Anyhow, this educated, well-tanned, well-off, retired man replied with ennui to Jeff's dinner out question with, "Maybe at McDonald’s sometime?!" I have known this man for over 30 years, and he is known to frequent finer restaurants and travel internationally. When I once asked him if he had ever read my column, he replied, "Then I'd have to spend a dollar to buy the paper!"

Jeff has a somewhat innocent goodness, and he does not have as jaded an outlook on humanity as I do. I continue to tell him, "No good deed goes unpunished." This same man, as he climbed onto the steps of the Jolly Trolley, swung around and exclaimed, "I save many quarters this way," as he was then transported back to his home overlooking Silver Lake. I guess I don't have to worry about him reading this about himself because he won't spend the dollar for it.

The Cape Gazette is a very good bargain for a dollar in my opinion, and to many others of the minions who even stand outside convenience stores early on Tuesdays and Fridays to turn its colorful pages. They also happily deposit a dollar's worth of quarters up and down the streets of coastal Sussex.

So be careful, for I may hold a mirror to your face. You won’t know when you might appear. I think people kind of like that, mostly. They're always wanting to give me ideas and seem to get a kick out of the local flavor of my column. But then there was the woman, a lover of my art, who had shipped several paintings of mine to Washington, D.C., from the Rose Bowl Flea Market in California. She was coming to town and asked me out to dinner; hoping for an honorarium, I asked her where. She replied Arby's. I had been hoping for The Back Porch. Since this was not what I had hoped for, I asked her what she did for a living. She said, "I'm a fire eater!"

The get-together dinner never occurred. I guess the lure of the circus beckoned, and I didn't want to stand in line at Arby's in the reflection of a fun house mirror to figure out this exotic person's character.