Fort Worth Stories No. 2

Way back here, I told a story about our then-new surroundings in the western half of the Metroplex, but for some reason I never told another Fort Worth Story.

This past week, I shared this on Facebook, so I thought it would make a decent Fort Worth Story, even if it's not much of a story as it a series of observations.

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At the Tom Thumb on Camp Bowie in Fort Worth, time moves very slowly. The Eurythmics song on the store speakers sounds like it's a 45 played at 33. A man named Larry, who most probably fought in the Korean War & who should be dozing on a porch in retirement bliss, unhurriedly works the register in the ironically entitled Express Lane. He has a plastic bag fetish; he never puts more than two items in a bag, he loves to pull each one up & out in a deliberate, even robotic motion, handing them over after each completed fill to the customer, so someone who's bought the limit of fifteen items now has eight plastic bags in their shopping cart. A man who looks older than Larry, if that's possible, waits ten minutes in front of me to buy a can of peas. He seems so proud to get his can in a plastic bag but then can't figure out how to exit the store, & is still wandering around when it's my turn. As I approach the counter, I tell Larry, "I won't need a bag," & this makes him drop my Tom Thumb discount card. "No bags?" he says incredulously. Then he spends a minute trying to find my card behind the register. When I leave, I feel almost as old as Larry, & nowhere as proud of my purchase as the man with the can of peas, who follows me out the door, but then seems confused about where he's now found himself in the strange outside world.

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