Home » Current Issue » The Mirror » Page 2
‘Cheaper, and besides, you’ve avoided that awful plastic covering the cut halves.’
‘We didn’t have plastic in my day,’ he replied, as if his still being alive now made no claim to this being his day too, ‘but look, here we are back with them offering paper bags at the checkout.’
‘My gran used to bring groceries home in big brown paper bags,’ Merry acknowledged. ‘Double-bagged for cans and bottles.’
Where had that memory come from? Merry did smile then. You don’t have to be old to enjoy reminiscing, though it obviously helped.
Friendly exchange accomplished, she glanced back to the queue behind them, which had been joined by a mother in lycra with a sleepy child in the seat of their trolley. Then her initial fears were realised – the old man was not done. He chuckled into conversational gear. ‘I worked in the corner store when I was fourteen.’
Caught, Merry did some quick calculations. That would have been in the 1950s. 60s at a pinch. Before she was born. History. Like on a television channel. Quaint and entertaining. She forced herself to lend half an ear, investing her full attention at a point she didn’t see coming in the long old-man ramble.
The old man had once been a young delivery boy with a heavy bicycle and a massive basket and brakes that you had to pedal backwards to engage. Bumpety-bump, his words travelled the backroads of memory. Customers could also pop by to shop themselves, the store was, after all, convenient on a suburban corner. They stood in front of the counter and asked for what they wanted. The grocer fetched the produce down from shelves and weighed out flour and sugar and rice and dry goods by pounds and ounces, while other items like apples and oranges were carefully counted individually into paper bags.
So none of this modern performance anxiety in front of thirty-sex choices of jam in a crowded aisle… Merry’s mind wandered. None of the worried reading of the label for nutritional information and recipes prepared in under five minutes… Simpler times. Merry’s occasional, random ‘wow’ and ‘oh’ and ‘really?’ said all that was needed to satisfy the orator. Meanwhile she noted that Prince William was receding in the latest front cover paparazzi shots. Take that, class and privilege.
