Some Beautiful Eggs

What are the chances of this happening?

I went to a favorite grocery store on the far south side of our town to buy eggs. I bought two cartons of eighteen eggs and another dozen which with two of the eggs in my refrigerator would add up to fifty which is what I needed to put in the fifty bag lunches I was going to make for people on the Street Angels route the next day.

At the checkout, the cashier smiled at me and said, “Looks like you’re cooking a lot of eggs today, what are they for?”

I actually like nosy cashiers. They give off signs of life and camaraderie that remind me of my mom and my aunt in their aprons leaning against the kitchen counter yakking while the potatoes were boiling.

“I’m making bag lunches for homeless people.” This was the simplest explanation if not entirely politically correct.

“How do you get the lunches to people?” She asked. And so, I told her that I volunteered with Street Angels and that we had two buses that had routes through the city, stopping where they knew people were staying – at parks, under bridges, all sorts of places.

“Oh,” she said, putting the eggs in a plastic bag. “I was homeless three years ago. During the pandemic. It was so hard. Everything was closed. All the places with food were closed. It was really hard.”

We went back and forth a bit more. She said she was glad to know about the lunches and I told her I was glad I met her, and we both went about our business.

I walked out to the truck, put the eggs on the seat, and said to my husband, “What are the chances of this happening?”

I thought a lot about the cashier today while I boiled those eggs and put each one in a lunch bag along with a salami sandwich, orange slices, cookies, and a fruit snack. They were really the most perfect eggs and each one had a story.