I drive to the mall to return the slippers I bought for my mom. Wrong size, wrong style, too expensive. She turns 72 tomorrow and should have the pair she wants, even if they arrive a little after her birthday. On the country station a Fox news broadcast has a soundbite of a Republican Senator calling the impeachment testimony “a matter of hearsay.” On the NPR station live coverage of the trial features a Democratic Senator quoting Alexander Hamilton. In the food court of the mall a man in an orange shirt and cheap sunglasses calls a hello to me and I bounce it back. It’s a strange time of day to be alone, running errands, nothing to do but fix my mistakes.
I’ll call the shoe store clerk a kid because I’m closer to 40 than 30, but I can’t bring myself to call him a young man. He’s sipping carefully from a glass of ice water because he had his wisdom teeth out the day before. I find the best people at the mall, the people who I would hire in an instant if I had a place to employ them. The kid can’t be more than 25, and he’s managing the store, working the morning shift despite being in pain because it’s time to do inventory. Next year, he tells me, he hopes to be in school earning his MBA.
They don’t have a pair in the size and style I want but when he sees me hesitate he offers to order and ship them direct to mom at no cost, and as he processes the return we joke about sensible shoes and sneakerheads (he has over 150 pairs, he buys and sells them for extra money). I ask him if he’s interested in a job that’s opened up at my old office but no, he’s got it all worked out, and anyway desk jobs were never his thing. I hope he succeeds. On my way back out the food court I smile at an old couple that remind me of my parents and the woman grumps to her husband, “Everyone’s so smiley today. What’s that all about?” The man in the orange shirt is gone.
The news is over and Travis Tritt fills my car as I drive home, asking the lord to have mercy on the working man.
“Uncle Sam's got his hands in my pockets/And he helps himself each time he needs a dime/Them politicians treat me like a mushroom/'Cause they feed me bull and keep me in the blind.”
And there’s a silent house waiting, and a thousand tasks, and a budget that needs to be made for the next few months, because I have left the best paying job I ever had to write about shoe store managers, country music and other things that make me feel glad to be alive. And it may not have been the smartest decision I ever made, but by the time you’re closer to 40 than 30 you’ve learned a few things, about fear, and grit and showing up even when you’re having a bad day. It makes me feel better about our country, and the world to know that there are kids who figured it out way before me, and that they care enough to make sure a stranger’s birthday present arrives on time. That’s why I’m so smiley today, ma’am.