Fruited Plain

It’s incredible that in the land of the free and the home of the brave that a regular person can’t go to a grocery store in the middle of a pandemic without getting shot and killed.

I heard there were people who got shot in the grocery store in Boulder, Colorado, who had gone there to get their COVID vaccinations. The irony is too easy, the stuff of a very macabre Saturday Night Live. Think of it, a person finally falls in an eligible group, scrambles around the internet to find an appointment, and then, Bam! Stroke of Luck! scores an appointment at the gosh-darn grocery store, thus killing two birds with one stone, shopping and vaccinating, although those aren’t the two birds who end up getting killed.

It’s all hideous.

Last Sunday, I went grocery shopping in a big store, the first time in a year. I lingered over the peppers and the cilantro, spent long minutes trying to pull apart plastic produce bags without licking my fingers first, finally using the ice packed around the broccoli to get my fingers just wet enough to get traction on the bags. It was a lot of work so I gave up and just put things in my cart, bagless. Five limes rolled around the bottom of my cart and, at the checkout, I realized that each one cost about a penny more because the cashier didn’t know I had five of them (for a dollar), buried as they were under ears of sweet corn, frozen shrimp, and Greek yogurt. This bothered me for a minute but I said nothing to her. It seemed like a pretty insignificant problem.

I bet there was an old woman buying limes in Boulder. And she either got out of the store alive or she didn’t. Either way, she’ll never be the same.

The point isn’t that it could have been me. The point is that it could be any of us, anytime, anywhere. There is no way of knowing. Suffering through the pandemic won’t help us, nor looking both ways when we cross the street, or helping the poor, or protecting our neighbors, or doing any of a thousand things to protect ourselves and others. The people in charge, the ones who can change the fact that a person can buy an assault rifle in the time it takes to type this post, those people don’t care about any of that. That any one of us could get shot while we’re worrying about being overcharged a penny a lime makes them no never mind.

It’s all hideous.

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“I have not seen in the circumstances they have described guns were obtained, but if they were done lawfully, it already seems we have a process and if someone chooses to break the law, there’s very little we can do besides arrest them after they’ve committed the act,” said (Wisconsin) Assembly Speaker Robin Vos.” CBS 58 Newsroom, March 23, 2021

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Photo by Andrew Coop on Unsplash