McDonald's sells earthworm burgers
Since people are going bonkers today, racing to the nearest gas station in a panic and acting like absolute fools here in ATL thanks to rumors gone wild, I just thought I'd join in the fun and games by digging deep and whipping out a classic urban legend that sent Americans into a frenzy back in the early '80s.
How about let's panic over all the folks along the Gulf Coast who have no homes, no jobs and who've lost family members instead of how we'll fill up our SUV so we can look cool speeding on the interstate? Worry about how you're going to save back some money in order to donate to the Red Cross, Salvation Army and other charities to HELP these folks. Mull that over in the three-hour gas line. Or if you're changing your order at McDonald's.
Lucky me
This morning I'd been thinking that I should start practicing my guitar again. Tonight I feel blessed just to have dry floors.
Mixed messages
Flooding, high winds, fear, destruction, death, survival and for some, an odd sense of redemption. That lady heading into the Superdome last night in New Orleans probably had it right. God may be telling us something.
Here comes a regular
They were having a grand old Saturday night kind of time at Johnny's Pizza around when I walked in, dog-tired from working literally non-stop from noon to eight on a day I usually have off. I noticed the two old school regulars hanging out at Counter Culture, the little back counter by the pizza ovens where the regulars are so regular that they'll bring your order to you or ring you up at the register if the waitresses or cooks are running behind.
Last night, Those Guys were joking around with a large group of friends at a table opposite me. I ate alone at a booth, but was totally amused by their ongoing conversation. On my way to pay up, I cracked a joke with the table bunch that got them all laughing. Heading back their way towards the rear door, the table group invited me, a complete stranger, to pull up a chair and join them. And I did. Then I was drawn into a conversation with Those Guys about random, silly things. Finally, I had to bow out and take my leave. "Okay, darlin', we'll catch you next time we see you here. Be careful drivin' home," Joe, the guy who's manned the register before in times of chaos, said as I waved goodbye, thanking them for the company. Mike, the other guy, gave me the signature smile and "Later" half-wave I've seen him send so many folks off with over the years.
"Saturdays in the South" was the name of the special newspaper section I'd been posting online all day. It detailed what Southern fans loved most about game day Saturdays during college football season. But for me - overly tired and feeling a little bit lonely, even in such a friendly, familiar place - this particular Saturday in the South was special because Atlanta's traded a lot of its Southern hospitality in for transplated, artificial urban swank over the years. And so it was comforting to be among the real Atlantans like myself, the real Southerners who still think of ourselves as just folks and who consider everybody a regular as soon as they come through the door.
Palm Beach style
He stepped out of the hulking Chevy Tahoe ahead of me in the drive-thru line this morning looking, I have to admit, immaculate. Totally preppy and knowing how to pull it off: blue button-up collared shirt, crisply ironed; pleated khaki shorts sporting a knit belt with maroon-and-royal blue mallards dotting its circumference; tan moccasins made of real soft leather (replete with tassels). He wore no socks.
Thin, tan and trim, he was the literal J. Crew catalog dad come to life. With a too-graceful ease, he lifted the rear cargo door of the SUV, revealing a packed-to-the-rafters -- but expertly packed, mind you -- vacationer's trunk containing an Eddie Bauer baby stroller, numerous Eddie Bauer canvas luggage bags and a vivid set of floral-printed lime green and white toiletry-type bags, obviously his wife's. Removing something from the Jenga stack in his cargo space, he shut the trunk door and gave me a "Hey, thanks for being cool about waiting on us" little half-wave/point. It wasn't really necessary but it was a nice touch. I noticed his license plate: Florida - Palm Beach County, where Hurricane Katrina had just left flooding and misery among the super rich in her wake.
Pulling up to the window, he took his order - two coffees - from the young black girl working inside the bagel shop, handing her about $4. She gave him his change and he then handed her back $2. Cynic that I've grown to be, I first thought, "Palm Beach style. We know you've got money." And then I realized: It wasn't really necessary but it was a nice touch.
Oh, you handsome devil
Sitting in a seemingly endless line of traffic this morning, I watched the attractive man in front of me go through what I have to presume is a precise daily grooming ritual. Combing down his hair, so closely-cropped that it was nearly shaven, he then patted, re-patted and re-re-patted his freshly-combed scalp to ensure that nary a pristine hair was out of place. Then he checked again, just to be absolutely certain he hadn't missed a spot.
Putting his brush away, he next checked the length of his nose hairs - most likely also freshly-trimmed - in his rearview mirror before allowing himself a minute to finally relax and take a break from preening. We moved up a few feet towards the light and traffic stopped again.
As he flipped down the driver's side sun visor, carefully peering into its small mirror along with the rearview mirror to his right in order to now check his hair from both side angles at once, I pushed the "random" button on my CD player, then pushed it again when I was dissatisfied with the track that began playing. I'm picky like that.
Home base
Most people were born in public hospitals. I wasn't. I was born at Fort McPherson, right outside Atlanta. And I mean RIGHT outside - like, with the city limits on the other side of the high, chain-link, barbed-wire fence. The house I grew up in from 1972-81 was within walking distance of post.
We went there every day to buy clothes at the PX (Post Exchange), feed the ducks in the duck pond, bank, attend Mass on Sunday, go bowling, wait in hour-long lines for gas, go to the doctor, steal abandoned balls off the golf course, play Frisbee on the 1880s-era parade field, send mail, see movies at the Post Theater and play in the swimming pool. I didn't know what it was to shop in a regular grocery store until I was in my teens because we'd always bought all our groceries at the Commissary. My niece and I got our Cher dolls, our Donny and Marie dolls, our Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman dolls and anything else that was a must-have cool kids' toy in the '70s at the Toy Store on Post. To us, going "on Post" was fun - an adventure. We loved seeing the men and women in uniform in this special community that we were part of.
They closed the hospital at Fort Mac, as it's called by the locals in East Point, the city where I grew up that's right next door and that stands to suffer the most when the historic old post is closed in the future, long ago. I keep thinking that, like a good, responsible military kid, I should make arrangements to drop by the 1940s-era, red brick U.S. Army Health Clinic there and pick up my official Medical Record, documenting my medical life from age 0 to around nine, when we moved and I started seeing civilian doctors.
Before Fort McPherson is finally shuttered, I will pick up my records the way I remember my mother doing it so many times when I was small -- early in the morning when the Records Department opened, with proper ID at the ready, silently waiting her turn in line and with the understanding that uniformed military personnel always, without question, have priority.
Paul Newman and a ride home
A friend told me today that she's never read S.E. Hinton's "The Outsiders," which I found just plain hard to believe. But she's 20 and I'm now ancient at 33 and there's a real generation gap there, I guess. It's funny that we even got on the subject because this past Monday my niece, who's 36, and I started talking about the books on our junior high reading lists in the mid-'80s and how we bet some of them were probably long gone today since American parents don't want their kids to suffer even a hangnail, much less read a novel about poor teens with little parental supervision in Oklahoma who get in gang fights with switchblades, run away from home and fight with rich, clean-cut, socially-powerful but morally corrupt Socs.
So I told my friend that I'd loan her my absolutely worn-out copy of "The Outsiders" to read. And hopefully re-read. Because everyone should remember this opening sentence: "When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home."
On to September
Summer doesn't really end in Georgia or in the South until late October. By Halloween, you should be wearing jeans and feeling a slight chill in the air. Autumn, and eventually winter, will come sooner than later. It always does.
While autumn is my favorite season, short though it is around here, I hate to see summer, with its long days, go away. This summer didn't turn out the way I'd planned and I feel like most of this year has been something of a waste for me, personally. I didn't accomplish hardly any goals I'd set for myself and I feel like I have little hope of making real headway on anything as the year's end approaches.
September is around the corner, however, and who knows? Maybe I'm wrong about me.
Welcome home, Roxy Carmichael
My niece and I picked up her new German Shorthaired Pointer puppy, Roxanne (Roxy for short; this blog's title comes from the "Roxy Carmichael" joke I'd made earlier in the day), at the ATL airport this afternoon and before we'd even toted Roxy's carrier literally 50 feet from baggage claim the sweet little baby girl already had people lining up to pet her. We'd brought cameras to document Roxy's grand arrival and when Anya, a pretty little blonde of about nine or ten, asked if she could pet and smooch the newest family member we of course said yes. But Anya was also acting as kid lookout for us since we weren't supposed to take Roxy out of the carrier and we, in fact, had done just that in order to give our baby girl some much-needed water and leg-stretching time.
Snapping a photo of my niece, Roxy and Anya, who was just passing through ATL on her way to some destination far away that will forever remain a mystery, we got a huge smile from the little girl when we told her she was Roxy's first friend in Atlanta and that we'd make sure and put that on the back of the picture when we put it in the photo album. "Bye Roxy!," Anya said, smiling and waving back at us, skipping off to rejoin her own family somewhere at baggage claim.
That ad is true. Dogs rule.
You must be this tall to ride
My dad was finally admitted to the hospital today for shortness of breath. On one hand, it's good because they can give him treatments and really watch him. On the other, you never like to see anyone go into the hospital.
Going to see him back in the ER, I had to smile at something funny someone had posted in the nurses' station. Hanging next to a vertical bar chart of height measurements was a hand-lettered sign reading "You must be this tall to ride."
Nurses. They dare to care. And to have a sense of humor, too.
Free the weed
Spraypainted on the side of a railroad boxcar that I drove by on my way to work this afternoon was the message "Free the weed." Beneath it, the same graffiti artist had painted a huge pot leaf. Why it, out of all the other, fancier graffiti painted on the many, many rusty old boxcars, caught my eye I don't know. Some railroad workers stood nearby, looking hard and tough in their grimy t-shirts, sweating in the brutal afternoon heat.
Later, as I was finishing my supper at a nearby burrito place, a pack of super-rich boys from the local prep school who had been getting louder and louder and more obnoxious as the minutes ticked away decided to pick on an old man as he left the restaurant. The man, who was old enough to remember the days when young men didn't brag about their supposed sex lives in public, must have given the lot of them a mild glare because the ugliest, zittiest of the crew waited until the man was safely 2/3 of the way out the door before saying "Hey sir, do you have any FRIENDS?" loud enough for his buddies to hear and chuckle about.
Driving away, I wished that posse of lame knuckleheads would meet up with the railroad men and pop off to one of those guys. Burritos taste better than fist sandwiches.
Life is good
My mother, father and I waited two and a half hours in the doctor's office today, leaving with no more of an answer on why my father has dropped down to 114 pounds and has no appetite.
We know he has a small gallstone. We know he has COPD and severe emphysema, which is being treated. We know he has always been thin and has never been a big eater, but we know that never has he been this gaunt. We know that if he had surgery to remove the gallstone, he might end up on a ventilator for life and we know that we might have to worry about post-op complications from pneumonia. We know he is an extremely high-risk anesthesia patient because his lungs are in such bad shape thanks to decades of smoking and we know that something is making him not want to eat. We know that something must be done medically to reverse this condition.
Looking at my mother, who'd been crying earlier in the day when my father and I weren't home, her eyes red, puffy and swollen with circles down to there, I thought that while she looked pretty in the light olive green "Life Is Good" t-shirt with the tiny blue and yellow flip-flops on the front that I'd bought her on my last vacation in Florida, the message bore something of a bittersweet irony on this particular day.
Small change
On the way to my car all too late this evening after a grueling day at work, I noticed a shiny new dime lying on the pavement of the parking garage. For a split second I considered picking it up, but I didn't. Quarters, I'll still make the effort for. Dimes? Not likely.
Dimes, nickels, pennies - as adults, we can't be bothered to gather them off the streets anymore the way we once did as children. Maybe it's all part of a bigger cycle that we've now become part of: We nonchalantly overlook these coins as small and insignificant while the next lucky child who happens upon that dime, nickel or penny relishes his or her gleaming new treasure.
Smothering
Once I told someone that during a period of time a few years back when I was really depressed, the feeling was like being under a bunch of blankets, being too hot and wanting to just throw all the covers off to cool down and rid yourself of everything weighing you down mentally. Then, once you started feeling better and averaging out emotionally, as it were, you'd slowly start pulling the covers back up one by one as you needed to.
Right now, I'm back under all those blankets again and I want to throw just a few of them off but I can't. I remember how it felt three years ago to be out from under everything for just a little while and to have a sense of renewal and I miss that feeling, that cooling feeling.
Alternative transportation
Racing each other anonymously on our various ways to our jobs or wherever on the workingman's speedway known as the interstate, we might have missed them - most of the other drivers probably did - but I was lucky enough to catch sight of them right when they passed over the highway.
Canada geese, a flock of them, were taking flight to some unknown destination. Starting off, there was a little traffic jam as they jockeyed for position to see who would lead the group but in an instant, with an innate precision honed over too many years to count, they formed an almost perfect "V," so graceful and stately, so unhurried on their long journey across open skies.
One good turn
Finishing my seventh and final lap around the track in the sweltering heat, I was so glad that today's workout was over. Three years ago, I was in fairly good shape. Now I'm having to start all over again. It's depressing.
My two miles finished, I glanced down to check my time. Instead, I noticed the back of a Georgia driver's license lying on the track's crushed sand-and-gravel surface. Turning it over, I recognized the woman pictured as someone who'd left the park about 10 minutes earlier.
So I walked over to a police officer, wisely parked under a shade tree, and gave her the license. Like fighting to take back control over my fitness and health, it was the right thing to do.
Keep digging
After my little nieces and my "adopted" niece (their 10-year-old friend who we love like family) made a full day of it, we started off for their homes and were having a great time in the car when I heard rumblings about something that had fallen beside the seat. And things suddenly got too quiet. A quick glance backwards showed my adopted niece staring straight ahead, her face flooded with tears. I'd had no idea she'd been crying; it broke my heart. "She lost part of her necklace that her friend made for her," my oldest niece, sitting with her, said.
Pulling off the highway, I parked and started digging - literally - under the back seat. It was a team effort. My 10-year-old niece gamely tried to help, holding up the part of the seat I'd lifted just enough to wedge my weak left hand beneath, feebly fumbling around for the little trinket. My littlest niece offered to try her tiny hand in place of mine. Desperately, I asked my extra niece if she was sure this was where she'd dropped the piece. "Yes," she replied anxiously, "it fell right there - beside the money." The money? There's no money, I said, just the bolt holding down the seat carriage and...
Oh, God. That's it. It's so tiny. Please don't let me drop it. Please... Please...Once the little blue-and-white swirled heart, so delicate and small, had been safely tucked away in Niece No. Three's Hello Kitty backpack, there was a promise of no more tears, only smiles. It's why you pull off the road. It's why you keep looking when you don't know where to look. It's why you don't stop until you find what you're not even sure you've been looking for.
Found
Ironic, isn't it, that I had to search high and low on the internet to find anything about
FOUND Magazine and its creator,
Davy Rothbart, who treasures the throwaway grocery lists, windshield notes, photos, etc., that the rest of us toss into File 13 every day?
CNN ran a segment on Rothbart and his magazine last night and it was fascinating. My favorite part of the piece? A windshield note left for someone who'd blocked in another car that read, in heavy black bold writing, " 'Inconsiderate' is what people must think when you come to mind."
Sing me to sleep
I'm tired and I want to go to bed.
Too much to do, not enough time to get it all done. And yet I keep going, going...
Discovery is home
Tracking the space shuttle has never been my thing, not even since seeing the Challenger explode when I was 13 (I was home from school, sick, and saw Dan Rather cut in on CBS' "The Price Is Right" to give the news; he was visibly shaken) or hearing about Columbia's breakup upon re-entry in 2003 over the radio while I was shopping for folk pottery up in the north Georgia mountains.
But this morning I'd taken my dad to have some tests at the hospital and the waiting room TV was set to ABC. They were running a special report on Discovery's return to Earth - the first re-entry attempt by a space shuttle since the Columbia disaster. The crew had to land in California, where it was still pitch dark, so Discovery appeared as a small white dot at first, then grew larger and larger until it actually looked like the space shuttle we're used to seeing.
Everyone in the waiting room, many of them noticeably sick and awaiting some sort of uncomfortable test, nevertheless stared silently and intently at the TV screen, watching as Earth welcomed Discovery home after 14 days in space, its most precious cargo still onboard, still alive.
Breathe again
Waking up at the ungodly hour of 4 o'clock this morning to watch the special coverage of space shuttle Discovery's planned re-entry - an event we used to take for granted until the Columbia disaster in 2003 - I instead found myself stunned to learn that longtime
ABC News anchor Peter Jennings had died. Jennings announced his diagnosis on "World News Tonight" back in April with a noticeably scratchy voice, nothing like the glib delivery we'd grown used to hearing, and it was a rather startlingly frank goodbye from such a public figure in such a public forum.
He was only 67 and had said we'd see him on the air from time to time again, but that never happened. Lung cancer, I learned this morning while watching ABC's tribute coverage, claims 90% of its victims in five years - 75% in two years. 10% of people diagnosed with the wretched disease never smoked a cancerstick in their lives. (That would be me, for instance - the girl who once took all of two puffs on a ciggie and got so sick she wondered why people CHOOSE to do this.)
My father has smoked all his life, since he was at least 17. He's 76 now. He has a form of emphysema called
COPD. It's not lung cancer and he so far hasn't been diagnosed with any form of lung cancer, which is good news - not to mention amazing, honestly. I hope he's lucky and never is.
But a co-worker who's 65, two years younger than Jennings and also a lifetime smoker, was just told that he has lung cancer. He's not just my colleague, he's my friend - my buddy. I've missed him at work and now, knowing the harsh facts and statistics, I've lost a lot of the hope I had before 4 a.m. today. But that won't stop me from calling him tonight or going to visit him soon. The Yankees need both of us to root them on this year and I won't let them - or him, a fan to do The Boss proud - down.
The summer of my discontent
My niece, her husband, their girls and our college-bound friend B. from Iowa stopped by on their way back from a weekend jaunt to St. Simons Island. It was so awesome to see them since they're always pretty much out-of-pocket (and B. is, well, in Iowa). The last time I saw the girls was back in June and I've really missed them. One will turn nine this September and the other turns eleven in January. Unreal. I remember feeding them both with bottles back when they were little tiny babies. But I love hanging out with them and they've each got such neat, defined little personalities. The older one is a daredevil, earthy, deep-thinking type and her little sister is a princess who can go from happy-go-lucky to tenderheart in a minute.
Next week they both head back to school and that's it for the summer I didn't get to spend with them. Right now they love their Aunt M., they think it's so cool when they get my approval about some Kid Thing that's important to them and I know the day is coming when Cool Aunt M. won't be cool anymore. They won't ask their mom, "Can I ride to the restaurant with Aunt M.?" because they know we'll pop in a mix CD and I'll let them wear my sunglasses and we'll talk about stuff that worries them (kids they don't want to be in class with, etc.) that maybe they're not so comfortable talking to their mom and dad about. They'll do that with their other teenage friends. And they'll spend their summers with them while I'm regretting missing out on this one.
Kmart... Yes, Kmart
My love for Kmart totally marks me as a child of the '70s but I don't care. The '70s were a great time to be a kid. There wasn't all the pressure there is today to look trendy and cool. We went to school in Keds and Hang Ten t-shirts and Levi's and nobody looked at us weird.
Anyway, today I notched this year's Kmart Summer Tour - two Kmarts in two suburbs in two hours. Some Martha Stewart bedsheets had caught my eye on
kmart.com and since I'm never one to turn down new bedsheets (no pun intended), I hit the Big K trail and immediately realized that everyone else like me who'd been scared away from IKEA in the past month or so had slunk back to Kmart to take advantage of cheap yet stylish bedding, thanks be to Her Marthaness. Shackled under home arrest or not, Call Her Miss Stewart didn't disappoint; I left Kmart with two sets of bedsheets (two pillowcases, a sheet and a fitted sheet in each) for what I'd have paid for far less bedding at IKEA.
The real truth about why I still love Kmart after all these years? Because this happened while I was Desperately Seeking Sheets: I glanced down an aisle and just at the split second I did, this boy - probably nine or ten - went rocketing by in the opposite direction, riding like Speed Racer on a Kmart shopping cart before quickly disappearing behind a shelf of rugs. His mom followed behind leisurely. She wasn't yelling at the kid or taking him aside and trying to do her best Carl Jung imitation on him. ("Are you acting out, Napoleon? Is that the emotion you're demonstrating right now? Mommy feels limited in her punishment options currently since we're in public and I think we need to work on coming to a mutual understanding of each others' action potential.")
She just let him ride, Kmart air conditioning system blowing free through his hair, super smile on his face. Just like we did back in the '70s, when a kid could be a kid and the only thing stopping you from winning an imaginary race down the main Kmart drag was a Blue Light Special. Or the too-sweet smell of a cherry Icee.
What Jeremiah knows that I don't
My friend Sherman just sent me seven CDs and one DVD through the mail, all the way from San Francisco. Five of the CDs are mixes, two are CD copies and the DVD is a compilation of some shows and movies he likes. I'm working my way through the mix CDs right now and color me impressed. Unlike my harum-scarum tosspot olios, Sherman actually put some thought into his selections.
We became e-mail friends thanks to
The John Mayer Trading Page, a fun place where Mayer fans (or non-Mayer fans) can hang out and gab about all things Mayer (or non-Mayer). So we both enjoy good acoustic music (like Mayer's) and Sherman included some lovely guitar ditties on the five discs, the simplest and prettiest track being
Marc Broussard's "Jeremiah's Prayer." It's a lament about losing a friend to death but doing your best to keep them alive in your heart - a tall order since death is the great unknown.
It's easy to tell ourselves we or our loved ones will be OK after dying, that we'll pass on to a better place, and I'd like to believe it - I do my best to believe it - but the mystery just looms when it's only me and a quiet hour of the night.
Perchance to dream
I had that dream again last night, the one where I'm trying to call in to my old workplace, Turtle's Records & Tapes, and let my boss know that I'm not going to be able to make it in for my shift. The thing is, I always get some kid on the phone who's just started working there and they don't know that I worked there for seven years and was an assistant manager for two years before the store closed.
In my recurring dream, the store is still inexplicably open despite the chain being defunct for well over a decade now, and I keep telling whichever lamebrain I'm on the phone with that I need to speak to Pam or Mike, the two cool managers I worked with, but they're never there and the idiot kid always hangs up on me. Then I finally end up calling back again and again, only to find out that I haven't been on the schedule since, like, three months earlier - and I'd missed my shift THEN.
This dream is a lot like my other recurring dream, where I'm back in high school and I absolutely cannot get to some class that I really need to get to - usually math or English class, but sometimes science. Sometimes the dream varies and I've been absent from class, but for reasons that haven't been my fault, and I feel like I'm way behind in my studies and I need to catch up but I can't because no matter how hard I try, I can never make it to class.
Exit 231 off I-75 north
Few things sadden me more than seeing a box of toys lying by the side of the interstate, stuffed animals strewn along the dirty, steaming pavement. That's the case at an exit near my house. I could only make out a teddy bear among the numerous forlorn toys, but I hope if nothing else that some hitchhiker at least has a better day if he or she happens on the lot.
Requiem for a train
Grabbing breakfast this morning at the local coffee shop, I watched a mom and her two kids check out the bagel selection. Things were going swimmingly for the trio until the little girl, probably around seven or eight, came over to where I was at the coffee stand and started peering into the blackness of a gap between the pastry display coolers and the coffee bar counter. Her mom then came over to see what was going on and the little girl said "But Mommy, I see a small object right back there," pointing into the inky abyss, gettng that seriously hopeful look that only small kids can. "Sorry, darling," Mom said in a lovely English accent, "but I don't see it anywhere."
I'd noticed the girl's shoes, an adorable pair of sparkly rainbow "jelly" sandals, that were the kind of footwear my eight- and 10-year-old nieces would go apers over themselves and I smiled at the mom and girl. The mom looked at me, kind of sheepishly, smiled and said, "We lost something in there a couple of years ago." The little girl, not wanting to surrender the dream of rescuing her missing toy, said in a sad, wistful way, "It was Henry the Train," never taking her eyes off the darkness of Henry's final resting place.
In a second or so, the girl's brother had decided on his breakfast and Mom had, in her gentle, soothing English Mom way, asked her daughter if she'd like a muffin top or a bagel. Skipping over to Mom in her sparkly rainbow sandals, the little girl mulled her options.
A stamp, a book, what?
While mailing a package to my friend Michelle in Brooklyn this morning at the local Post Office, I tried somewhat in vain to help an Asian lady figure out the quickest, easiest way to buy five stamps to mail letters home to her family. She spoke broken English and by the time I had explained that she didn't have to stand in the long line - there was a machine accepting dollar bills and $2 would buy her the five stamps she needed - she'd changed her mind and opted to just buy a book. "I send lot letters home," she said, smiling, as I let her back in line in front of me. It was no big deal.
When the clerk, who's worked there forever and is usually pretty nice to me and the other customers, called her to the window, she asked the Asian lady "Do you need a stamp, a book, what?" in kind of a terse way. The man who'd been ahead of the lady in line, now one window over, told the clerk politely and in an even tone of voice, "She needs a book." The clerk finished the transaction, handed the lady her book and the lady smiled, thanking me first and the man next on her way out, genuinely appreciative for all of our help (however minor).
The clerk was more than helpful when I asked her how I could send care packages overseas to Iraq as part of the
My Soldier program I signed up for online. She gave me a customs slip, explained the process, what not to send - pretty much everything I'd need to know.
But then again, I wasn't trying to buy a book of stamps. In broken English.
