On Tuesday morning, while standing in a long line at the grocery store (local Staters, very happy to take your money, but not ever too fast, and my too-expensive frozen blueberries were melting as usual!), my eyes landed on the cover of one of the trashy magazines near the register and came to rest on a large cover photo of Bruce Jenner. “His eyes always look so kind,” I thought, just as the older man in front of me turned my way and gestured his gnarled, working-man’s hand toward the slick photos.
“I wonder if he ever looks in a mirror?” he said, grinning. “He makes a real ugly woman!”
And there it was. Echoes of a Facebook post from a high-school peer I’d seen over the weekend on Jenner’s decision to transition from male to female: heading up two cereal boxes, one from earlier in Jenner’s running career and the other with a doctored photo of Jenner as a woman on it, the single word in the status update was “Freak.” My heart sank all over again as the old man stood there looking at me. I so often feel lonesome amongst my own kind anyway, mainly because so many of them seem to value things like trashy magazines that elevate some people while pitting the rest of us against others and so forth and too many still say hateful things about people who are the least bit different from themselves, and I was on the verge of my all-out hermit response (Just get home! You don’t belong in this place!) when the man spoke again, looking directly at me this time.
“Don’t you think so?” Gesturing at the more recent photo of Jenner. I paused then for several seconds, really looking at the man who’d posed the question. His heavily lined, tanned face bore the marks of someone who has worked long years in desert sun for little pay; his thick silver hair was similar to mine in that neither have likely seen or come near a comb in the last couple months; his fingers were bent; he had a good twenty years on me: and he had just asked me a question.
So I quit on the hermit and looked him straight in the eye and said, “Well no, actually, I don’t. I never judge people by their looks. Came upon it as a child, seeing people do that and be mean to others because of their looks or their weight or their clothes or their grades or whatever, and I decided way back then that it made no sense and I would never do it. And, by God, I haven’t. I look for the soul within, the person. Always. That’s all I care about. Couldn’t care less about the superficial. I pay so little attention to all that that somebody could run up in here buck naked, and I probably wouldn’t notice unless you pointed it out to me. I think we need to value everybody. No exceptions.”
I said it friendly, but firm, and I didn’t mumble or lower my voice. I wasn’t accusing him (or anyone else) of anything and made that clear. He had asked my opinion, and I was giving it. Period. By the time I quit speaking, though, he was nodding and smiling at me, the lines on his face crinkling into a great big happy smile, as were three other people in the line (two behind and one ahead of him).
A woman right behind me said loudly, “I agree!” And the old man, still nodding, as the line crept forward, said, “That’s right. It surely is. You’re right.” His whole demeanor had changed somehow; it was softer, more open, and that affected mine as well. I grinned at him and meant it and forgot all about being a hermit or racing home with melting blueberries.
“We are all better than we’re behaving lately, I believe. We are better people than we know,” I added, and several of us nodded together, and then we all got caught up in the maw of paying for groceries that cost too much for people who work for a living anymore, and the moment passed as I hurried my recently frozen package of too expensive blueberries out to the car. But as I have reflected on this since then, it has come to me strong that we are never as alone as we feel, and sometimes? Sometimes we should simply make a point of speaking up for what is good in all of us because that’s how we learn just how well-companioned we are. I am so grateful for human beings like Bruce Jenner, who have the courage to live unafraid toward their visions, and I am equally grateful for the old man—who took the time to engage me in small talk that taught me a bit more about how deep our hearts are even when we don’t feel them.
And I wish you grocery store lines faster than ours and good souls to learn from while standing in the queues.
