Variety pack

Two very separate and distinct trains of thought today.

Lunch time…

I walked over to the university to have lunch with my aunt today. The weather was warm enough, mid-60sF, to be luxurious after a weird, funky winter. More importantly, though, the sun was out, warming concrete, grass, and flesh alike with its rays.

The student center has a bunch of pic-nic tables, the kind where the benches are attached to the square table at the base, out in front and there’s enough lawn that, yes, there were four guys in a big, loose circle throwing a Frisbee back and forth. Guys were running around in shorts and flip-flops and girls were showing a lot more skin than we’ve seen in a while in this latitude.

And there she was, lying on a bench, her head propped on her bag, sunglasses definitively covering her eyes, a girl I suddenly wanted to kiss.

I have no idea who she is; I don’t know her name, or anything else about her other than what I perceived in a glance, but there was something in the way she lay there, in the stillness of her, in the way she gave herself up to the sun, in way the gap between the bottom of her shirt and the edge of her jeans, low across her hips, and the wide, brown-leather belt she wore looked that made me want to be the one to kiss that soft skin, to rub my cheek against her belly, to make her blind with pleasure.

She wasn’t particularly beautiful or striking but there was something compelling about her.

It’s not as if hers is the first 20-something slice of firm belly I’ve ever seen. It’s not as if she was attainable even if I were in a position to attain her. So why her? Why at that moment that reaction?

Hours later, at the grocery store…

Dryer sheets. They’re a luxury item, right? Maslow’s hierarchy of needs never mentions dryer sheets. Nevertheless, I’m standing in line for them in the midst of late-afternoon shoppers, largely retired couples in which most of the wives look none too happy about having a companion on the weekly shopping trip.

The woman in front of me is buying her groceries with WIC vouchers and the trainee cashier is having issues ringing up a package of sliced cheese. Since WIC can only be used for certain food items you have to tell the cashier up front that you’ll be using vouchers even before any one of your items is rung up, and the deus in machina kept telling the cashier that this particular item was not allowed.

And as I stood there with my one item, waiting, tired and run down from a long, ridiculous week at work all I could think was “I buy that cheese every week.” The woman checking out didn’t seem too perturbed about not being able to get the cheese, and I could have easily bought it for her — after all, if I have the money for dryer sheets I have the money for cheese, even if it’s someone else’s cheese, right?

But then I thought that maybe even the offer wouldn’t be welcomed. So what is it that separates charity from condescension? The motivation of the gesturer? The need of the person receiving the gesture?

When she was done I bought my dryer sheets and went home still without answers to any of the day’s questions.