God comes up at Costco

I pushed my cart to the back of the shortest checkout line. I didn't notice that the couple ahead of me had a child in a stroller until its mother said to me, "We're going to purchase him."
    I dutifully looked the child over and said, "You can't afford him."
    "No, actually, we can't."
    "Well, maybe if you can hang in there with him for a few decades, he can help support you when you get old."
    The boy's mother thought for a moment and said,"Yes, that's the way God planned things, isn't it?"     "No," I said. "There is no God. God doesn't exist."
    "Well, for me he does," she said. "I don't want to argue with you."
    "And I don't want to argue with you. But you did bring it up."
    "Yes, you're right. And I appreciate making this connection with you. You were very forthright."
    "And atheists can be good guys, right?" I said.
    "Of course," she said, and her husband agreed. "My father's an atheist," he said.
    "Is he also a good guy?" I asked.
    "Absolutely," he said. "My hero."
    While her husband checked out, she surprised me by asking me my name. I told her, making a point to say it clearly and distinctly.
    I asked what her name was. "How do you spell that?"
    "Just like Jane," she said. "With an accented e."
    Her last name was pronounced "back," but spelled like the members of the prolific musical family of the Classical period. She told me her maiden name, said she was native American. We talked about how many families don't take care of their aged anymore in America. People work, they move away.
    We could have talked a lot longer than it took them to check out.

Actually, it was a good day for Costco encounters. I'd laughed a lot with the two opticians earlier, whom I knew well from previous visits. They were both helping me, unusually their only customer on a Saturday morning, and we got into a partying mood exchanging banters while David checked whether they could obtain a replacement for the broken frame of my distance glasses and Christina adjusted two pairs of my reading glasses.
    Then a smiling exchange with the pony-tailed Hawaiian young man in the pharmacy who helped me find the Kirkland substitute for Mucinex. I greeted him by his famously familiar name, Blaise, which always reminds me of the wager.

    And next the booth for Charleston Coffee Roasters, where my wife had asked me to sample whether I liked their coffee too. I did, their dark roasted signature blend, beans from Colombia, Sumatra, and Mexico. I asked the man serving samples how they selected beans from those countries. "We taste and experiment, find what we like and what maintains its taste even as the coffee sits a while and cools off."
    I told him mine rarely sits, I drink it fast and hot.
    I remembered Jim Rix's signing his books at Costco stores out in Nevada and California. "You work for the company, don't you," I said.
    The man smiled. "I'm the owner," he said.
    I asked for a business card and got him to autograph it. "It's hard to get a product into Costco to stay," I said. "If it's books, they have to sell when you're not there to sign copies. Good luck."
    I put a two-pound bag of dark roast into my cart. "I love your coffee."

While sampling three kinds of freshly baked bread (the two plainest, French baguette and sourdough, were even more appetizing than the garlic-flavored), I noticed that the husband of the woman sampling ahead of me was standing listly aside not having any and apparently not particularly interested in bread. I tried to make eye contact with him, but I'm not sure I managed it.
    I saw him again outside the garden cooler, where he manifest the same facial expression and listlessness.
    And again near the cheeses and pies. I pushed my cart up next to his (or his wife's) and said, "You seem to be just suffering this shopping trip. You look as though you'd rather be home reading a book or conducting a scientific experiment."
    At last he brightened a bit, and even smiled. "Yes," he said, "that is correct."

At checkout, I prepaid for a cup of swirled chocolate and vanilla nonfat yogurt and while waiting in the canteen line for it, I asked the woman ahead of me whether her trousers with a stripe down the outside of the leg were part of a uniform. "Do you work for the post office?"
    She confirmed it and seemed pleased that I'd noticed the stripe. I asked her where she worked and whether she knew my post office friend whose son is a freshman at Carolina and has already made the All ACC cross-country team. She seemed to regret that she didn't.
    After she was served, she turned and said good-bye.

While I was standing near the canteen to eat my yogurt, Jané eagerly approached me from the direction of the restrooms.
    "I've lost my family!" she said a little theatrically. "Did you do something to them?"
    I smiled. "Are you thinking, Hey, that wasn't a good guy after all. He kidnapped my boy!"
    She smiled. "Oh, there they are," she said. Her husband was sitting at a table with their son, looking at us.
    She left me and went to them, thinking too, I imagine, How unexpected.