It’s getting to be one rough, cold world we live in when we can’t even trust our neighbour not to steal from us when we’re in the grocery store.
And yet, there I was the other day, loading my bagged groceries into my cart to wheel them out to my car, when I saw a big hairy hand reach down and grab one of my shopping bags from the counter.
It contained a loaf of bread I’d bought.
I looked from the hand that held my bread, up a long, strong arm and into the glaring face of a thief. He stared at me, his dark eyes challenging and stern. Silently, without speaking, he dared me to make any protest about what he’d just done.
He was a big man, obviously used to getting his own way. Slowly, he put the bag in his cart.
“So this is what a robber looks like,” I thought. And in an instant, I made up my mind not to be scared off. Big man or small, I’d bought and paid for that bread and nobody was going to take it from me. I’d fight him for it if I had to, though I knew my chances of winning were slim. But you can’t run away from trouble or you’ll never stop running.
I fixed a gaze on him that left no doubt I meant business.
“Pardon me,” I said in a gruff, but crisp and unfriendly voice. “That’s my loaf of bread you’ve got there.”
He froze his humourless, anti-social eyes on me. And for a few seconds that seemed to stretch into an hour, neither one of us moved or spoke or even blinked, poised like two cats preparing for battle.
The air seemed to go silent around us and the clerk who had rung through our groceries just moments before tensed up as she waited for the explosion she could feel was coming.
Finally, he cracked.
“Whatever you say,” he said, in a surprisingly meek and yielding voice. He reached in his cart, pulled out the bag with the bread in it, and handed it to me.
“Here you go,” were his final, defeated words to me.
I took the bag, put it in my cart with the rest of my purchases, and turned to leave the store.
And as I wheeled my supplies across the parking lot to my car, I felt the glowing confidence that comes from facing down an aggressor and the swelling pride at having stood up for myself.
And I thought about what a world we humans have built when people will steal your food away from you right in public even when they know you know they’re doing it.
“When’s it ever going to end?” I wondered.
Similar thoughts and even more troubling ones, ran through my mind as I loaded my groceries into my trunk. First the bag with the canned soup, then the bananas, the cereal, the paper towels, the milk, the cheese and the potato chips. And the bag with the loaf of bread in it.
But turning back to my cart, I spied one more bag still sitting in it.
“What’s that?” I asked myself, and I tried to think what else I’d bought. Hesitatingly, I peeked inside it.
“Uh, oh,” I said.
Fortunately, I caught up with the man I’d stolen the bread from as he was about to get in his car at the other end of the parking lot. When I handed it back to him, he gave me the same stare he had in the store. And said nothing.
Some people just don’t appreciate honesty.
©1989 Jim Hagarty
