Saturday, December 03, 2005

get you through

Technically, my job is to sell books. Untechnically, it looks a little different.

For example, I spent twenty minutes this week in the pets section with a middle-aged man who really, really needed to talk to someone about having to have his dog put down. "I felt like a murderer," he said, and both of us stood there with tears in our eyes while I talked about responsibility and how sometimes the right decision is still awful. "You're right, you're right, my wife says the same thing," he told me. But sometimes, people need to hear it from a stranger. And some of us are stranger than others.

I've had too many of these conversations to count in my many customer service jobs. Some of them are one-time things--the woman whose husband had lost his job and was so depressed she found herself asking God every day to give her the strength to get through this time, or the woman whose husband had just been diagnosed with Alzheimer's. (Hey, on the crazy chance that either of you are reading this, I remember you both and I hope you're doing okay.) Some of them are people you see all the time. Back in my waitressing days I found myself telling a customer "You know what your problem is? You're a coward. She wants to marry you and you know you don't want to marry her, and you keep saying that you're staying with her because you don't want to hurt her. But she deserves someone who wants her for who she is. You think you're being nice, but you're just being chicken." If people ask for my opinion they usually get it, and I'm sure this is unrelated to being nicknamed "Little Miss Bossy" as a child.

The thing is that I know most people don't think of those things when they think about what it is a waitress or a bookseller does in their job. Some days I resent that, because I think it's part of the whole cultural thing about what constitutes "real work." Some days I'm angry that people who would never dream of seeing a psychiatrist feel perfectly okay about dumping their troubles on someone who's paid eight dollars an hour instead of eighty.

The other part though is that so many people are in so much pain and they don't know how to muddle through it. I never cared that much about serving coffee, but my regular who came by to tell me that even though he had a bunch of money he'd been spending it all on cocaine and he was trying to quit now, that stuck with me. spook and I were talking the night I came home from talking to the dog guy, because it made me cry. I'm crying now, trying to write about him. He was heartbroken, and I care about that. spook reminded me that what people have in common is pain. Everyone suffers, and that makes us in some way all the same and not alone, even when we feel like we're going to suffocate from loneliness.

I'm thinking a lot about pain, because Christmas, let's face it, is a painful time of year. For a lot of people, this is the time when you look around at what the story of a family is and you look at your real family and feel like you're going to choke on the disappointment. So I try to remember when people are short with me or don't look me in the eye that they're hurting. Don't get me wrong--it's not okay to yell at the cashiers, no matter how mean your great-aunt was at last year's dinner. It's just that when people are awful I can step back and think that the guy in the tie that cost almost as much as I make in a month is rude not because he's an asshole who thinks that my job makes me a non-person (although hell, he may be,) but because his mom died a month ago and he's trying to figure out his first Christmas without her. The story I tell myself might not be true, but the pain at the centre of it is, and that makes tie-guy just like me, so I can have compassion for both of us. It sounds spiritual, but it's selfish. I just find my days less upsetting that way.

4 comments:

Debra said...

I just happened upon your blog and I really enjoy it. You lead an interesting life :) Best wishes--Debra

Jennifer Jane Whiteford said...

'Col, the dog thing totally made me weep.

Oh, and I wanted to let you know that I am sort of a loser and I didn't get your "birthday" package done until yesterday so it should be there soon. Finally.

Oops.

xoJ.

'col said...

yay, Jen! this means it didn't get lost in the post! there's no such thing as late with regards to presents.

hey, thanks Debra. it's always neat when new folks happen by.

off to accomplish things, at least in theory.

Anonymous said...

Christmas, artichokes, and projected images

I love artichokes, a lot. After I've eaten the preserved kind out of the can or jar, I drink the 'juice'. (Hold on dear reader, really, I am going somewhere with this). Always having a bottle on the go in the fridge is a mental health pre-emptive strike. (And hey amuhrica, just when did that word enter all our general lexicons?)

But right there at the centre of a fresh one is this inedible, felicitously named choke, that will at best, make you do that cat thing (that you actually do 'col) where you lick the top of your own mouth in vain while frowning, or at worst, well, make you regret that you don't have nine lives. You gotta throw that out; there's no more eating till you do.

And by the way (cue the tangent), I think that Unnamed Big Bad Bookstore Chain, is all about such judging by covers. I think it is book porn. They put a fancy new cover on an old book, and think you'll by it, hope you'll just indisciminantly buy, a lot. What about ideas and content? They took book commodification to a new level. Cue the Leonard Cohen, b/c 'everybody knows' that already I guess. But the book sellers - hey, some of my best friends! You know, once I even went to a book-selling-duos' Barbeque Of Love. So no intended dissing of the hard working book match-making book sellers, who are living a more ethical, meaningful life then the good lot of their customers. Sorry, I just exchanged one judgement for another there.

Hold on - this was supposed to have something to do with Christmas. Right. What's with the things that get wrapped up and looking so nicey, but they're really just crap at the core? And who keeps wrapping it up and 'giving' it to me again every twelve months? Didn't I say I don't need a lime green acrylic sweater last year at this time? And then you wake up from the projected image of home for the holidays, and find you live in eighties-knee-length-sweater family.

And how sad was I when I found out that that sardonic Holly Hunter movie was actually about home for the Thanksgiving holidays?

Yah, so 'col, you know that your prose is so touching and bang on exactly the way life actually is from time to time, and it got me going, the whole 'choking on disappointment' line. So thank you, b/c Holly Hunter didn't come through with empathizing with me, but you always do.