Melting Ice
A few years ago, my neighborhood grocery store underwent a remodel. Previously I had lived a few blocks from the store and cherished it. After moving, I drove ten minutes out of my way to continue shopping at this clean supermarket where I already knew the layout and could finish my shopping quickly. I am a creature of routine and habit, and find solace in the things I can predict. Once the store began to undergo its renovation—ripping up the linoleum floors to reveal the concrete base—I knew I needed to find another store closer to my new apartment. The benefit of familiarity became too overwhelmed by the various detractions to continue patronage. There were many other stores I could shop at, and my continued use of the one became a detriment to my character, making myself appear childish and incapable of accepting change. For what other reason would a grown adult need to drive out of their way to use the same store they’re accustomed to? I was older, and my character could stand for me to branch out and attempt to change. I was not too old for that yet.
In the end, I began visiting the various options around my apartment, one at a time, trying them out for a few weeks each before switching to the next, attempting to determine the one that had the strongest combination of proximity, price, cleanliness, and produce quality. It would seem to the diligent reader that this was in its own way a detrimental aspect to my character, though other readers may find it charming or, in certain extreme cases, inspiring. I can find pride in myself that I did not generate a point-based system and complex spreadsheet to calculate my strongest choices—no, in this test I went purely off of my own emotional core.
If I were a day of the week, I would be Sunday.
I cherished Sundays. It had been my routine for years to do my weekly shopping on Sunday mornings—ritualistic prayer and offerings at the altar of my body. When the world shut down for Covid-19, cooking became a part of my personality, so much so that learning to cook had been as seismic a rupturing event in my life as the national quarantine and ensuing isolation.
In late summer, I shopped at the closest grocery store with average prices. The aisles were close together, meat quality was poor, and the place always seemed understaffed, at least on those Sunday mornings. Over the few weeks I shopped there, I witnessed them install automatic gates at either entrance, presumably to prevent shoplifting, though the store was situated in a very wealthy neighborhood with minimal unhoused population, on account of the severity of the residents. That, accompanied with the decision to lock up so many items, struck me as bizarre precautionary measures against imaginary phantoms that, if examined in full light, would evaporate and be revealed for the shams they were; in essence, I did not believe the store lost any significant amount of money to shoplifting, let alone more than the CEO himself pocketed, who, certainly, had done more harm to the company than any unhoused person stealing a sandwich would through the sheer gall of giving himself such a salary while the stores themselves were staffed with ill-tempered, poorly-paid employees who were on strike in a constantly dirty and lowly-stocked store.
And yet, through course of habit and a lack of time researching, I returned, again, to this store for my weekly shopping late in the summer. There were few things I needed, and I knew the store so well by that point that I filled my basket within minutes, then joined the checkout line. Always on Sunday mornings the same cashier worked—a very sweet woman in her fifties who wore a permanent scowl, yet greeted each customer jovially. You could feel the pressure that time had exerted upon her; the exertion of her life she wore in her posture. She worked slowly, so I usually accounted for an extra ten or fifteen minutes in order to check out upon entering the line. My parents had worked at grocery stores my entire life, so I held a specific kind of familiar warmth for the people who made a career of working at them. I saw in my cashier the varicose veins that plagued my mother, and the mangled feet that required surgery of my father.
Once it was my turn to load the conveyor belt, I did so quickly in my systematic order: produce, meats, refrigerated items, cans, bottles, then breads, rice, boxes, and, finally, eggs. Then I set the divider after my order to allow the next person to deposit their goods for purchase.
“Excuse me,” the woman behind me said. “Could you step aside so I can put this down?”
She must have been in her seventies, hunched over, and carried a 12-pack of soda in her arms. I pushed my cart as far forward as I could, then squeezed my body against the rack of candies so that she could maneuver herself to place the soda at the end of the conveyor belt, where just enough room was left for it.
“Of course,” I said, while doing so.
She placed the soda with a vocal exhalation, then took a step back to her basket, left on the linoleum floor beside her feet.
“You know, you really have manners. So many people your age wouldn’t have said anything to me, and pretended they hadn’t heard me at all. I can tell you were raised well, because you’re looking at me now as I talk. Trust me, you don’t know how rare that is, for somebody as old as I am. Most pretend I don’t exist.”
I said something to her about being raised to be polite and considerate. And she was right, in some sense, when I considered how many inconsiderate people I encountered throughout the day. It took less than a minute to account for somebody else, and that seemed too large a price for so many strangers I passed.
“It’s hell getting old,” she continued to tell me. “The loneliness gets to you. I’m glad I met you, thank you for giving me a hope for the future. That there are still people like us out in the world.”
I told her something about growing up in the south, sweet tea and sweaty summers, people who invoked God, yet didn’t understand Jesus’ teachings.
At that moment, a young father with a toddler entered the store, passed through the security gate, then reversed course and backed out in order to get a better look at a display of flowers that had been placed at the entrance. As he passed the barrier again, an alarm sounded, and the shrill beam of high-frequency buzzing reverberated through the store.
“It’s awful having to do this,” the older woman said. “It’s what happens when you let too many immigrants into this country. They don’t understand how Americans are. You think this is American life? Grocery stores with prison gates? I know it’s the immigrants—I know it, since I am one. I can say that. I came from Ukraine sixty years ago. Look at Europe now, at Paris, at Berlin. These places that used to be the center of culture are now overrun with muslims and immigrants, people who don’t care about history, about Europe, about Christianity. You can see it in the news. Europe’s ruined themselves. They’ve got it all wrong, this open border thing, letting them in, giving them jobs while the Parisians and the Germans lose out on work. They want to go there because the governments are socialist. Because they’re welcoming. Because it’s wrong to say otherwise. You can’t say otherwise! If I say this in France, I lose my job. You know why? Because they want Europe to be destroyed. They want the symbols of white history gone. Isn’t that horrible?
“And it’s happening here, in California. You can see it right there in these gates, how we have to change ourselves to account for these immigrants who don’t care about laws, about rules, about history. And in this neighborhood! It’s mostly white, that’s why they come here. They know the rich, white people have the good stores, stores that don’t have alarms and locks. But then they start coming, they start stealing. All of a sudden, the store has a security guard. The store locks everything up. The store reacts to these people, and they don’t even live in the neighborhood! They’ve ruined their own stores, can’t steal from them anymore, so they have to go to somebody else’s and ruin it for them, too. It’s nonsense. It’s horrible. I know you understand me, and that you see this too. You’re a white man. I know I can say this to you. You’re polite. You wouldn’t steal anything.
“But we’ve got to close the borders. We’ve got to let them know they can’t keep coming. You see the caravans? They bus people in. You know the government, the previous one, they shipped in these people to these cities, gave them jobs, gave them houses, gave them cellphones, gave them healthcare, let them vote. It’s horrible, all so they can stay in power! All so they can suck the blood out of every hardworking, white American. I know this because I’ve seen this, because I lived this. America has been very good to me, since moving here. I’ve done very well. And now it’s all at risk, because these new people are going to take it. Isn’t that horrible?”
Throughout her speech, I stared at her, and struggled to figure out how to navigate the conversation. I knew the cashier was listening. I saw her facial expressions in the corner of my eye, of shock, of disquietude. I did not agree with what this older woman said, and I knew it reflected poorly on me that she would invoke these sentiments and feel like I would understand her. Did I really look like that? Or was it merely me making her comfortable through politeness? Would the cashier think that I had been in agreement with her? It wasn’t my attitude to get into an argument in public, especially with a stranger. But the sequence of events reminded me of a similar encounter that I had had, in another grocery store, a few months previous.
—
The federal occupation of Los Angeles began in June of 2025. They sent their armed gestapo, really a regulatory agency that had been gifted guns and, in truth, encouraged to provoke violence, despite being merely regulatory, in order to enact a Presidential promise to deport millions upon millions of criminal, illegal immigrants. That these immigrants did not actually have criminal records was of no importance. To the federal government, there was only the spin. The reality or unreality of criminality was inconsequential. If you belonged to a class of citizenry that was against the actions of the federal government, you were deemed, inherently, criminal. Hispanic, black, gay, trans, a single, liberal woman. All of these groups were considered criminal to the ruling party. So when they grabbed their megaphones and claimed cities were overrun with crime—contrary to the actual, statistical proof that crime rates had dropped over the last 50 years, and we were in the safest year in half a century, and that white collar crime rates were far exceeding violent crime rates—they meant that they were overrun with liberals, homosexuals, African Americans, and Hispanic Americans. Each of these groups was ideologically opposed to the ruling party, and this ideological opposition was proof enough of this implied criminality.
When the gestapo landed in Los Angeles, they centered their strategy around local Home Depots, grabbing day workers out of parking lots. They grabbed children out of school, and green card holders out of court rooms while attempting to gain citizenship to the country legally. This they did while ignoring the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution. And this they also did in defiance of the fourth amendment, claiming that the substantiated legal system of the United States took too long, had too much process, and was a bunch of red tape that slowed down their goal of mass-deportation.
And it was in this way that the presence of the gestapo was felt in my life—in the tension that appeared in grocery stores, where the parking lots became empty, and the people inside them moved with speed, fear, and the belief that at any moment armed thugs would come in, drop tear gas, and grab whomever they did not like to ship to a concentration camp in another state, or in the worst cases to camps in foreign nations, effectively trafficking slaves to allies.
It was at this time, too, that I became enamored with the martini and the manhattan, classic cocktails that, in their simplicity, became refuges of solace to me, enjoying one or two or three of them nightly, as a salve against the onslaught of news information, and also to aid in my falling asleep, which solved the initial descent into slumber, but did not affect my tendency to wake up at three or four in the morning and struggle to pass again into REM. So I found myself biweekly needing to purchase another bag of frozen ice for the sole purpose of mixing cocktails.
On this Sunday in early June, when the federal occupation of Los Angeles was still new, I had grabbed my items and my bag of ice and stood in line behind an older man in his seventies who was loquacious, to say the least. He wore a dark green vest, stained and faded corduroy pants, and had on a pair of metal glasses so thick the lenses lay like oval cakes against his nose. On the vest he had sewn multiple patches, indicating that he was a veteran, his regiment, his purple heart.
“When you get to be my age,” he told the cashier, “You’ve got to go to the grocery store everyday! It becomes a ritual. Just to see people! My wife died ten years ago. Who do you think I have to talk to all day? Nobody! That’s why I like coming down here. Getting some hot food. A meal. A conversation with a nice fella like you. It’s stimulating. Helps the brain. Fights Alzheimer’s. All these folks with Alzheimer's, it's ‘cause they’re left alone and their brain atrophies. It’s a muscle after all. You’ve got to work it.”
The cashier was a middle-aged latino man. I had seen him many times in the grocery store, often working the register. I thought he also may have been a manager, as other times he would be stocking shelves, or watching the store. He was talkative, and always tried to engage with the customers. I stood behind them, wary of their conversation, as my items sat on the conveyor belt. The bag of ice at the end began to melt.
“It’s one of the best parts of this job,” the cashier said. “The people you meet. There are so many characters. I’ve learnt so many things while working this register.” At that he patted the side of the monitor before him. “There was a woman who was a veterinarian and explained to me how she had to perform cardiovascular procedures on a horse that was undergoing pulmonary embolisms. Then there was the daycare worker who had a bus full of 4-year-olds in a van outside buying bulk juice boxes and gummy bears. There’s a whole world out there. But everybody’s got to eat. Everybody has to shop at a grocery store. And they all come through this store. That’s why I always tell my family members: if you’re going to buy a stock, buy a stock in a grocery store. They will always be in business.”
He had finished ringing up the older man’s food—he had only gotten one styrofoam box from the hot bar and a bottle of soda—so there was nothing left to do, from the perspective of the business. I tapped my foot, since my countenance was eternally impatient.
“Man, when I was in Vietnam, I met so many people. They were lovely. So nice to all us soldiers. I think they were grateful, truly, that somebody had been there to try to defend them. That was the only good part, man. The rest of that. Whoa. That was Hell on Earth, brother. But I’d do it again. If I had the chance to start my life over and change anything, I would change nothing. I’d still go to Vietnam. I’d still get shot. I’d still see the terror in that jungle. Because I also saw beauty. Those amazing trees. The food. Some beautiful women. It was the worst time of my life, but it was also the best. I’d do it again, I swear to God, all of it. I love this country. What are you, Mexican? Your family move here? Yeah, I’d do all this for you guys. Freedom. That’s America. To be able to do what you want. And look at you. Came over here yourself. Got this job. Manager. Working hard at a store. That’s something a lot of people can’t comprehend these days: the value of hard work. Kudos to you, my friend. Working hard for your family. Making a living. That’s the essence of life. Enjoy it while you can. There’s a lot that can be gained from hard work, believe me.”
The cashier grabbed the receipt and handed it to the man.
“I hear you, man. I’m trying to instill that in my kids. Teach them that life isn’t easy. If you want comfort, you need to balance that out with times of hardship. That’s what life is to me, bro. Balance. You have to have the days of toil, dead on your feet, hard, calloused work. That makes those vacations, those days by the pool so much better. It’s that switch between the two where life is. You can’t have the juice without the squeeze. My daughter, she’s 14, already talking about being able to have her first job. When you’re that age, it’s all about having money to spend. To see your friends. Get some food. See a movie. But I’m glad that I’ve taught her the value of independence, you know? ‘Cause that’s what work gets you. It gets you the freedom to choose what you do with the rest of your time.”
The older man took the receipt, and continued the conversation with some platitudes about biking around his neighborhood, shelling newspapers when he was 12. To be frank, I lost track of the conversation, and tried to focus on something else so as to distract myself from the inevitability that it would be several minutes more before I was able to pay for my goods and continue with my day.
—
As the person in front of me in line grabbed their checkbook to pay, the cashier grabbed her telephone and made an announcement over the speaker system for help in the front. I looked around me and saw that the line to check out had extended far into the aisles of the store. I considered myself lucky, then, to have gotten in line when I did. Another stock boy from the produce section approached the front, and turned on the register beside us. He came around to our line, and grabbed the attention of the old woman behind me, who was still talking about the influence of immigrants on the curation decisions of the Louvre and the Tate. He told her that he could check her out, and she happily grabbed her cans of soda and turned to enter the other line. Right before she left, she turned to me again:
“It was very nice talking to you. I hope you have a lovely rest of your day.”
I thanked her for the kindness, then thanked God for removing her from the line. The person in front of me finally finished signing their check, then the cashier greeted me as she always did, with a Good morning, sir. She had asked me previously about my family: my wife and kids, how I must cook for them. I found it a waste of my time to correct her, and let her believe whatever fantasies she had concocted about me, a thirty-year-old man who did his grocery shopping alone on Sunday mornings. But, even knowing this about her, I wanted to signal something to her about the conversation she had just overheard. I wanted to lean forward and say, “Wasn’t that old woman crazy?” or, “I’m not racist.” But I found myself unable to find the words to defend myself. Then, I questioned whether I needed defending at all. After all, it wasn’t my mouth that had said the sentences. Nothing could’ve been construed as my own beliefs, like the legal disclaimers that play before commentary tracks on DVDs. But at the same time, was my inability to say anything in effect a compliance that signified, even if the words did not exit my mouth, that I still condoned them through the simple act of not actively discrediting them? I wrestled with these issues while the cashier rang up my groceries. I always bagged them myself, preferring to separate the goods as I wanted them separated, finding that the bag boys at these stores tended to do it wrong. The receptacle area was an automated lazy susan, with a button around the hip level that I could lean into to rotate the produce so I didn’t have to reach. I wished, then, that there had been a similar button attached to my brain to generate a fitting, wily, pithy response that signified the kind of person I was. Unfortunately, I don’t think well on my feet, so by the time I finished bagging, paid for the groceries, and stepped away from the register, all I could muster out of my throat was a simple: “Thank you.”