a moment in the day: supermarket

It's Solstice Saturday at the grocery store, and I'm heading into the fray. People and carts inching slowly around me, forcing their way toward the fudge aisle and its nonstop logjam around the jars of marshmallow fluff and cartons of sugar. People talk about Portland drivers, how they're polite to a fault, stopping to let everyone in while the people driving behind them boil in road rage at all the halting niceness, but here in the supermarket three days before Christmas Eve, under the nonstop piped-in Christmas music, it's dog eat dog in the aisles.

I try to remember my holiday cheer, my peace-on-earth-good-will-to-men. I try to remember that everyone is fighting a hard battle.

I think maybe I can cut through the laundry detergent aisle. A man there shoves his full-sized cart at an angle across the entire throughway. He bends over, engrossed in reading the writing on a plastic container of soap and displaying a wide spread of yuletide butt-crack.

It's going to be a long day.