Clockstop Orange
Apropos of nothing…except that I can’t forget it.
Last weekend I was in Trader Joe’s—a confession sure to cheer those certain that my aversion to FoxNews means I’m a closet liberal. (Worse, I bring my own canvas shopping bag. I might as well carry around a copy of Das Kapital while I stock up on fair-trade tea and organic apples.)
This time it was oranges, and the old Asian man crowding me apparently hadn’t gotten the memo: we shop here to feel smug about healthy community but don’t really go in for human contact. He gripped my arm with strength surprising for someone easily 900 years old.
“These are oranges?” he asked.
To him: “They are.” To myself: “What else would they be? Can’t he see I’m in a hurry?”
He wasn’t finished. “What is…?” He held up a grapefruit. I told him, much as one might inform a kindergartener. He swilled the word and kept his hold on my arm. “The Americans ate oranges.”
Indeed we do. Now I’ve really got to…what Americans? “In Vietnam.” The story that followed might have been ripped from the pages of a thriller. Maybe it was. By the end, his younger self had landed his plane—against orders—to pick up the bodies of five Americans left dead on the edge of a jungle. “There were wild animals,” he rasped, his rheumy eyes distant. “And they had mothers.” He spoke of delivering the fallen soldiers to American officers who took his name. His voice cracked. “They never said thank you.”
Now this may be a show he regularly puts on in the produce section. But I was willing to play my part out of regard for his performance, if not respect for his service. “You’re a brave man, and you did an honorable thing. Thank you.”
He bowed his head, turned, and shuffled off with his oranges in tow. I’ve thought of him several times since. A hero? A fabulist? Who cares. What mattered was standing still long enough to hear a story. I don’t do that often enough.
Thank you for sharing that story. Back in the early ’90s, I somehow found myself taken in by my hometown’s Vietnamese community. The older gentlemen, most of them fresh out of 15 years of “reeducation,” had some amazing stories.
And the culture they and their families, whether Buddhist or Catholic, brought with them was profoundly conservative. Men were men and women were women. Young and old alike listened to the same music and danced the same dances. As an American friend of mine who had a similar experience said, the Vietnamese provided him with a picture of a normal culture where America was sadly failing.
neat story. And, as a liberal, let me just say that there’s nothing ideological about shopping at trader joes or sparing the world a few more paper bags getting used. I also find the canvas bags easier to deal with.
Kara Hopkins’s anecdote is very poignant.
“Last weekend I was in Trader Joe’s—a confession sure to cheer those certain that my aversion to FoxNews means I’m a closet liberal.”
Well, Trader Joe’s is very anti-union, as was quite pleasing to inform the middle-class liberals who loved to shop there when I was an employee.
(My favorite part was when they would say, “But all the employees seem so happy.” And I’d get to answer, “That’s because they’re afraid you’ll complain and get them fired.”)
I yield to no one in my love of Trader Joe’s, my aversion to the Pop Snooze Channel (see couchbound Dad overnights, mainlining subliminal FNC c. 8 hrs., after 4 hrs. therein conscious: Oh, the Hume-Hannity!), and dutifully (to save 5c/bag) haul my permabags with me to Hannaford (in Maine) Fridays – and as one who, on a college spring break in 1982, paid a home visit to the late great Henry Hazlitt in Wilton (Connecticut), can attest that whatever liberalism I might be said to possess varies as wildly from that of the latter’s good NYT (suite prints) paymaster as my Montaigne-meets-Nock stoic “conservatism” varies from that of the pink-cheeked blueblazered set donning sword and buckler after every fresh objection-injection from the MRC’s NewsBlusters:
Now Ingraham! Now Graham! Now Philgramm, and Lopez!
On, Steyn! On, Stupid! On, Dunderhead and Bozell!
All the Dems we will scourge! With a flush to the Mall!
Now Rush away! Rush away! Rush away all!
In each but a nerd, they went straight to Judge Bork,
And sweat to their blogging, then barreled for pork,
And laying their fingers inside of their ears,
And aping Bill K, read the Standard for years;
They sprang to DeLay, to his toe they were mistle,
In neighboring ‘isles as shamrock to thistle.
But I heard them exclaim, ‘ere driven from sight,
“Groupthink Christmas to all, from what once was the Right.”
One of the most beautiful things about the Christian faith is that it posits that all acts, virtuous and non, are seen by an ever-watchful Creator and Judge.
Assuming that the man is being truthful, I hold it as a matter of faith that this man’s preservation of the dignity of the dead warmed the heart of Almighty God. The soldiers may not have been appreciative (I know I don’t do my best work when I’m scared and angry, either), but that man’s action did not go unappreciated just for that.
A very nice story. I share your reluctance to standing still long enough to hear “idle” stories from strangers, and your fondness for Trader Joe’s (I’m hooked on their dark chocolate–one pound of Belgium’s finest for $3.99.)
This reminds me of the time when, in 1998, I was touring solo along the Mosel River in Germany. I stopped to have lunch in a little restaurant and an older German couple nearby heard my German/English hybrid food order and told me to come eat with them, and that they would pay for my meal. The reason for this kind favor was simply that I was American, and the elderly gentleman had been a POW in America during World War II. He had been so grateful for the kind treatment he had received then that, 50+ years later, he was buying the lunch of a young American he didn’t know. I was simply amazed.
Somehow I doubt that an Iraqi held at Abu Ghraib prison will do that for a young American 50 years from now.