The Rite Aid down the street was uncharacteristically deserted this past early summer Saturday. The automatic double doors at my neighborhood’s location are timed particularly slow to open, the delay I think intentionally set by the management to identify the intoxicated.
I was there before noon to buy cheap beer in anticipation of a thirsty afternoon, grabbed the goods I had come for, and approached the checkout clerk. As I stood at the register while she rang up my purchase, the automatic doors to my right opened with a blast of hot, steamy air, and a woman in curlers and slippers entered, announcing, “Hey, Gurl!” I couldn’t tell to whom she was speaking until I spotted one of those Bluetooth phones that clip around one’s ear cyborg-style tucked beneath her mop of pink rollers. Her slippers hissed on the drugstore tiles.
She was obviously in no hurry to complete her drugstore mission but rather more interested in her personal conversation. As the clerk let me know how much I owed for my purchase, the Bluetooth woman said, “Gurl, you betta call me when dem biscuits is ready!” I reached for my wallet during which time Bluetooth’s party must have been talking, obvious from the long pause. She stopped walking, wrangling with an over-sized purse, and then spoke again, “I haven’t had me a biscuit in a minute!” I paid the clerk who gave me a twinkle-eyed grin. Bluetooth just stood there, her slipper hiss silent, still engrossed in her own not-so-private conversation, pining, “I do loves me some biscuits.”
Smiling, and with purchase in hand, I stood and waited patiently for the automatic double doors to open with a blast of oven-hot Louisiana oxygen-thin air, the kind my grandmother used to say “you could cut with a butter knife.”
I drove home daydreaming of fresh, homemade, hot buttered biscuits, my beer cans in the passenger seat already beginning to sweat.
Recent Comments