- If a customer wants a discount badly enough, s/he can get it. A lady came in and said haughtily, “I always get 10% senior citizen discount.” The store didn’t have a senior citizen discount, and I explained this, but I gave her a discount anyway to keep her from complaining more. My store also gave $5 discount for every $300 spent, after the database updated (i.e., the next day). A guy came in and rang up for $400 but didn’t pay. Then said “I want to go look at some other stuff.” I had to void the transaction in order to ring up other customers. When he came back, wanted to see his $5 discount on the system register. He raised his voice with me a couple of times, and I worked out a way to discount him $5. He checked the receipt for it.
- Managers will usually give in if the customer is insistent enough and if they can find a fault with the transaction. A lady came in and insisted that a particular kind of merchandise ($3.99) was $1.99. My temper got the better of me and I finally said, “Ma’am, please, this is $3.99, not $1.99.” She promptly reported me for “not being nice to her” and got her way with the manager.
- Customers expect a friendly face. My face has folds beside each mouth corner, and I look like I’m frowning even if I’m not. I had to expend a lot of energy showing a lot of teeth and speaking to customers; otherwise, they picked up on my expression and got an attitude.
- Cashiers have a lot of power. Be nice to them. A cashier has control over item discounts, tax-free sales (or not), discounts to your entire order, whether they’ll insist on seeing a coupon or just take your reference to it, whether you can use your coupon more than once (people try), and the personal information you submit for your loyalty account.
- Clerks get freebies. In my particular store, we sold perishable items. If an item was looking less than gorgeous, we would remove it from stock and usually throw it away. Clerks were free to take these items home. I got quite a few.
A memoir?
I sit here with a glass of oaky white wine, kind of cheap stuff, combobulating the idea.
The line
You have to understand something about New York. It’s a city where absolutely everyone is looking for any and every break they can get. There’s a shifting line of what’s up and what’s down. It’s a cold-hearted thing, as those on the bottom claw their way up, and those on the top whimper as they fall.
Ko and I were walking on the East side one Sunday afternoon when a man stopped ahead to put something in the corner garbage can. I spotted that it was a rolled up rug.
I, myself have put things out on the street to be taken. For example, a Pom-Pom Christmas tree from the 60s which I got tired of. That was gone within 5 minutes.
I immediately sped up to look at it. The back side of the rug faced outward. I saw that it was an oriental, and my heart jumped. I began to reach for it when another hand appeared. I turned and saw an old lady wearing a hat and coat on this Spring day.
Ko said, “Let her have it; she’s an old lady.”
I thought about what he said. I’d been pretty close to the poverty line myself for a couple of years. But as she reached her leather gloved hand closer to the rug, I snatched it out of the trash can.
Ko sighed in disapproval, but I didn’t care. It was something I wanted but couldn’t afford, and I wanted it more than I wanted to do a good deed. So I walked forward and waited for Ko to catch up. Behind, the old lady whimpered a little at my brashness. I didn’t care. This was The City. Up was up and down was down. This time, I was getting up, and couldn’t help it if she was old and on her way down.
When we got home, I opened it and saw that it was a well worn oriental rug – the type with years and years of standing up to well-shod feet crossing it in a nice apartment. I was happy with myself. After we got home, Ko pulled the vodka from his special shelf and drank himself into a stupor, ignoring me as he watched our small black and white TV.
A few months later, when Ko stopped grabbing my hand in his and started yelling at me when he drank, I quietly put my engagement ring on the dresser and didn’t put it back on. I waited for him to put it in a drawer, but he left it there.
A month later, when I loaded up a van to leave the city, I left the rug, but took the green ring.
The hole
There are large swaths of my life that I don’t understand: Why I went where I did, tried to be a good girl, rebelled, failed, left home, returned, any of it. And I think it’s because I never really understood my mother.
I can tell you that, for example, I never smoked, solely because my mother did smoke. That I stole a car, while my mother bought a new Thunderbird.
That my mother asked my weight every time I visited, all the while growing to a mammoth size and probably knowing, as older women do, that one day I’d fall on the wrong side of the line.
That I designed clothes from 1950s thrift shop finds, whereas my mother worked at a fancy department store. I can’t tell you why I was driven to remodel the looks from her youth, even though I know she had two skirts to wear, one made from an army blanket.
All I know is that my mother is gone, and the hole she left is a big part of my identity.
TMS/TMI
I’ve been depressed to various degrees for over 20 years. Have taken many medications. The doctor now recommends TMS. The doctor says “If you would, just try to open your mind.”
That, of course, is exactly what I’m afraid of (like ECT). TMS is Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation. They put an electromagnet on the outside of your head, tune it to the frequency your brain responds to, and pulse it to reset your dopamine receptors. It sounds like ECT Lite, but it’s noninvasive. Thank goodness for that, because I would not be happy. (This is a Lite description; for more, please check mayoclinic.org.)
It sounds like a desperation measure, and I guess it is. So why am I writing about this here? Because this is a weblog, which brings people together by their commonalities if I understand correctly. Openness, and all that. Removal of stigma, and all that. Here you go. If I go through with it, I’ll write more.
Later: It’s been put on hold until such time that it’s needed.
Over a year later: It’s needed.
Finish With A Red Lip
My mother was the queen bee of the family. The one who wore the lipstick.
Ours is a family who doesn’t smoke, drink, curse, or otherwise wear cosmetics. Who only wears their wedding rings or crosses as jewelry. A family who are elders of their church.
Once, my cousin got me to put on Mom’s red lipstick and when I was discovered, I got my mouth washed out with soap by Granny.
I never wore lipstick again. That is, until my mother died. Then I began wearing her perfume, “Fracas,” and experimenting with color on my mouth.
I found that with it, I could say many things to others that I hadn’t been able to before. However, these were not things my mother would say. Things like “I’m not fat.” Or, “I’ll wear what I want.” Or, “I don’t like that,” when someone hurt my feelings or insulted my politics.
I choose to feel, like, and say what I want. And if I want, with red lipstick.
Snowing Buddha
On this particular day, the cat had her first venture in the snow. Here’s the photo.
Then, we looked across the yard and saw this.
It was just so pretty.
Plumeria
At 4:00 a.m. in the parking lot of a Milan hotel, my friend Max asked, “Do you want to do this?” I wasn’t sure what he meant. Have breakfast? Date? I was very tired from our night out with his friends. But he kissed me, and then I knew what he meant.
“How?” I asked. “We will find a way. Leave it to me,” he said.
I fell into my bed and had many problems that morning. My coworker called to ask if I was coming to breakfast; my clothes were everywhere; I couldn’t find my passport. When I boarded the plane, the flight attendants whispered and I realized I looked so sick that they might kick me off the flight.
But I got home. I turned 40 and found out that Max would be moving from Milan to Boca Raton.
In April, I had a car collision and broke my hip and wrist. Max took me to Florida, where he cared for me.
The lush, seductive tropicality of Boca and West Palm startled me after the flat Texas landscape. I smelled Plumeria for the first time. Max bought a house, and we furnished it. Every afternoon, its upper clerestory windows filled with clouds moving in and then, the rain pouring over the Traveler Palm trees.
In the Summer, problems began. He often wanted to go out, and I wanted to stay home. One of his friends often disparaged me in Italian. I began going back home to my Texas apartment and visiting less frequently. My hip bones had slowly knit together, and the wrist was mostly working. In the Fall, I began work again in Texas after 6 months off.
At Christmas, I was devastated when I wasn’t asked to come to Florida, and I cried through Christmas at my parents’ house. The bloom was gone.
The Cow Painting
Picture, if you will, two young lovers trying to wedge a large painting into the trunk of a Mazda Miata in Key West. I had to have that painting, and would stop at nothing to get it.
Nevermind that it didn’t fit in the car; forget that there would be difficulty flying it back to Texas. The point was that it spoke to me of the life Max and I would have in Florida: Afternoons driving through the countryside, winding through the groves and pastures, down to Coral Gables or Mizner shopping areas and small beach towns.
The sky of the Florida key beach – particularly over the aqua water – was slightly violet. Inland, it was a puff blue with a blue-green tint. The skies that Max and I would live under would turn grayish when it rained, then immediately become sunny and light. We would cruise through beach towns with his friends and sit on verandas with tropical drinks.
We would pass by groves and cows lazily grazing in the marshes next to ponds.
We would buy a house with clerestory windows and a tile roof. There would be pool parties under an umbrella with free-flowing wine and beer. Ducks would come visit us every morning from the spillway. My garden would consist of herbs, landscape flowers, and orchids.
We had to take the painting back into the gallery after all because we could not fit it into the car with two people. I had it sent to my apartment in Texas. But Max forgot about it and never saw it again.
The Free Man
Dad was the son of a small town grocer and a woman with pretensions. His was born in the tail end of the Depression.
Inspired by a man about town, he went to chiropractic school and opened a practice in another small town. At the time, I was a small child and Mom, another woman with pretensions, was pregnant with my brother. Dad’s practice did badly and they had to go to his parents for help.
They counseled Dad to do the right thing for a family man: He enrolled in an education program at a small South Georgia college. He started out as a junior high school teacher and became a principal, with his own school. He had a hard time with teachers and students during the day, then a hard time with his angry and fighting marriage and children.
But there was another side to him. Dad caught the airplane bug early and started flying at 16, hanging out at the local airport. His parents let him do this, despite being unable to see out of one eye.
Every subsequent weekend, he went out to one of the local airports to hang around with other pilots. He scraped together money to buy a single-wing aluminum body airplane and spent years of weekends working on it. I remember him stripping off coats of paint. He remarked that each coat was a different life for the old bird. After he flew that plane, the expression on his face afterward said, “I’m free!”
Mom and Dad divorced a few years later; my brother moved out, and I moved on as best I could.
Dad then married a woman who knew how to take care of him, and tried for years to relate to me. He sent me letters that I didn’t read. After he died, I read them. He explained everything. I went from someone feeling like a parentless child to one with a treasure.
Lo Scriviti 