The man in line behind me

This would be a good place to
 sit down and get a grip

Recently, after I was finished with appointments for the day I stopped at the grocery store for dinner ingredients and low-hold hair spray that wouldn’t make my hairstyle look like a helmet or smell like air freshener. 

My mood was neutral but vulnerable given the weather which was sleety, and the crowd inside the store which was thick and slow moving, like tired cows.

I got my things and headed for a register. This store has probably a dozen of them, but this day only three were open in addition to the express lane which has laws about how many items you can send through. Even if fatigued, rushed people at that hour of the day customize the limit to mean 14 large items, and therefore send their more than fourteen small items through, I obey the law and I had sixteen items.

So I rolled to another register, making sure it was next to a closed one because, you know how this goes; eventually a nervous manager will survey the look of three open registers serving a crowd that is worthy of seven or eight, and order someone to get a key and open up another one. Shoppers know to be in position to get the eye contact from that incoming cashier to “come over.”

I got into position behind two full carts next to a closed register. A man got in line behind me. “What’s going on?” he asked me, “Are they opening up over there?”

Did I look at him with a flat, how-would-I-know expression like people have given me?

No.

My busy day was almost over, I had been successful in finding not only a pork roast that looked manageable, but a nice low-hold hair product, and I was feeling cheerful. 

So, I turned and said, “You know it’s anyone’s guess, isn’t it? I mean, look over there,” and I nodded toward the next register. “We see the signs, they’re lining up a bagger, right? And there’s someone with a tray so I would say we’re in good shape to be first in line.”

I smiled then, and he responded with a blank face as if there was nothing funny about registers that might or might not open.

Sure enough, the cashier opened up, looked over at the woman in line before me and gave her the “come on over” face. “Oh!” she exclaimed, and over she rolled.

The man behind me got upset.

“Hey, whoa. Hold on,” he said to me, “why did they pick her?”

I shrugged, and said "Maybe they saw her and not me."

“But I mean, you were right there!” He pointed at right there and said, "That's ridiculous."

He was a big guy, on the heavy side. He was not badly dressed in khakis and a brown polo shirt topped by an okay jacket, also brown. Probably he worked in a place where you don’t have to wear a suit, but can’t wear jeans either, maybe a tire or paint store. He had sandy hair with bangs that fell over his forehead, a large face, glasses, a fair complexion, a too-large gut, a nice watch and jumpy eyes that probably never failed to observe something aggravating.

“You should have told them you were waiting!” he said, arms folded.

I turned then and said, “You know what? I just don’t feel like worrying about something like that right now.” I looked at his eyes when I said it, and for a second, a second, I wanted to share with this grouch a philosophy that I keep taped on my outlook:

Aggravation is optional most of the time.  

We all encounter unpleased, cranky people and we all feel that way ourselves from time to time. It’s my nature to allow for a person’s bad day, or maybe-bad news, or perhaps a tangle of irritations they couldn’t resolve that day.

But there are other people who are so easily irritated, so often, and so bent on expressing it they’ve begun to see the world as full of irritating people who leave them no choice. Meanwhile the rest of us know that irritable people leave us with no choice but to shut them out.

There are people who would take that man’s behavior personally, maybe a spouse, or an employee,  maybe his children. I have had stretches where I would have felt as inept as he wanted me to, back when I thought too many things were probably my fault.

The holidays are over, the credit card hangover has arrived. We’re heading into the crappiest weather of the year, and we have a president who models one form of hate or another toward others every day. There are a lot of people like that man in line behind us.  It isn’t only good mental health to steer clear of them, it leaves us with our grace and civility intact, and a new choice to put it where it will do some good.

It will be the perfect story to tell my little group of ten-year-olds who are observing, and learning not to personalize, the actions of others:

Aggravation is optional most of the time.