Bill

Bill

Bill always looked like he just won the lottery. I would see him walk into the grocery store when I wasn’t away at school. Most of the elderly patrons scowled and complained bitterly about everything under the sun. One woman, “Scotch,” would come into the store with Scotch tape over her left eye and frantically argue with any cashier giving her pennies in change. “I said NO PENNIES!” and she would throw them onto the conveyor belt like an angry toddler hurling skittles.

Another woman, Linda, thought that she was Marilyn Monroe and would oftentimes wear her anemic blonde hair with copious layers of green eye shadow and blood-red lipstick spread all over her mouth like The Cure singer, Robert Smith. Did I mention that she is also a registered sex offender in Cuyahoga County? It’s true. She would pace in and out of the store for hours at a time and never buy a thing. She would go to the pay phone, mouth words into the receiver, and walk back outside. She loved to flirt with male store associates too. Fortunately, I was spared.

Bill was a rare entity. He never complained and he was certainly not a sex offender. He was quite wiry, about 5’9 in height, and must have been about 80 –– no younger than 70 though. He looked pretty good for his age. I’m not kidding when I say that he would literally spend an entire day in the store. Mind you, it was a small business even though there is a small franchise of these stores in Northeast Ohio. He would always walk out of the store with no more than two bags. We all knew that he came for the company --- our company.

He moved at a snail’s pace down each of the aisles, combing the shelves in the cereal section for something to his liking and staring aimlessly at the yogurt on the dairy counter. I always loved how he would ask us questions even though he knew the store better than any of us. “Excuse me, my good man! I have an issue here. I don’t know whether to buy the Yoplait light or Fruit-at-the-Bottom yogurt. What do you prefer?” He would always follow-up his questions with an unfunny joke that you couldn’t help but find endearing. We would end our spiels with “Have a nice day sir/ma’am!” He’d always bring his head up and belt out the monosyllabic words, “YOU TOO MAN!” It has been over a year since I stepped foot into the store and I still think about him here and there.

I wonder if he made it through another year. Does he still waltz into the store with his gangly stride? What is he really like? Does he have children? Are they grown? They must be. What did he do for a living? Has he always lived in Northeast Ohio? What makes him so genuine? What makes him laugh and cry?

Granted, I barely knew the man, but good vibes emanated from his demeanor. The grocery store was a rather upscale business, and we had a valet grocery service for the elderly and anyone who didn’t want to haul their groceries to their vehicles called “parcel pick-up.” Whenever Bill drove up to the curb he would always make a remark about how gorgeous of a day it was, even if it was blustery outside. I would load his back seat with his items on the rare occasion that he had more than a handful of goods. He’d tell stories about his daughter or make another joke that I could never understand because of the generation gap. He always tipped well, five dollars when the going rate was one. Then I’d close the door, wish him well, hear him belt out, “YOU TOO MAN!” and carry on with the day. It was always funny how he would say those words because he was such a frail guy. The three syllables boom, boom, boomed like a timpani at the end of a concerto.

My sister is still a cashier at the store. She works there on her summer breaks to pay for college. I ask about Bill and she hasn’t seen him in a while. It’s depressing, really. We hope that he is still living. If he isn’t, then I know that he lived each day as a lifetime. We should all take note.