Dover Dollar General, Sunday

Not much happens in my life, I mean, nothing very fun or exciting. I really don't do anything I don't want to do, though. Which is not to say that I don't cook or clean or pay bills or bathe, I guess I just mentally prepare myself for these types of activities and make myself want to do them. If I cook, I get to eat, and I like to eat. If I clean I get to walk across the floor without getting all kinds of dirt and dog hair and what I can only guess is bits of mortar or gravel stuck to my feet. Bills? TV. Bathing? People not thinking I don't bathe. Last Sunday I had to go out for some soda, juice, and milk, which no matter how much I buy I cannot keep stocked. I don't like leaving the house, not on any day but especially not on a Sunday afternoon. But I made myself want to do it because I wanted to not drink water anymore.

Walmart is my nightmare, plus it's all the way in Russellville. The Dover Supermarket is great, but not a cheap as the Dover Dollar General, so I loaded my two-year-old into the car. My eleven-year-old came along too which was great because I could leave the Story, the two-year-old, in the car with Hayden, the eleven-year-old. When I walked in I was really glad that I left the boys in the car. It was late in the afternoon so all the church-shoppers had already headed home and apparently after them comes a wave of meth addicts, buying their sugary drinks and salty dinners in cans.

When I leave the house each day, what usually happens is see how pale my skin is in the sunlight in my rearview mirror and realize that normal people probably would have done something with their hair, or my pants really don't fit quite the way they did when they came out of the dryer and I feel kind of bad or embarrassed about how I look. That day in Dollar General I felt very well-put-together and confident about my pale skin. In front of me was a girl with some other people roughly her age who had paler skin but with little scratches all over it and un-filled-in prison tattoos of a cross and a little fairy with a Confederate flag for wings. She was wearing black fuzzy slippers, mens' boxer shorts, and a Jeff Gordon t-shirt. Behind me was a woman (apparently meth-addict or not, people in the South still adhere to the unwritten rule that women do the shopping) in short-alls with the sides completely unbuttoned, a pink too-small tank top and also some slippers, although hers were pink. She had some kids with her. That's about all there is to the story. Nothing amazing happened and no matter how hard I tried to eavesdrop out could not make out what they were saying to the people with them. That would have made a better story...

I don't know if they did meth, and I don't know that they weren't really great people. Maybe they just really like those fuzzy slippers and the kind of life that allows them to forego shoes altogether. I hope that whatever they were doing that day that they enjoyed their canned red beans and rice and Kool-Aid. They made me, for those few minutes while I was sandwiched between them in line while the overly-friendly cashier chatted the first one up, feel very lucky and very blessed and a little bit sad.