I was having some apples weighed in the supermarket checkout line.
“Winesap?” asked the lady.
“No thanks, just the apples,” I riffed. She laughed. It’s a happy thing to make a stranger laugh, and after that we were kindred spirits. I went out of my way to go through her line. There was a compact of merriment, a virtual guarantee that one of us could make the other laugh. And we did too, for six months or so until one day she was gone. They said her husband got transferred, to Houston I think.
She’s still laughing, probably behind some supermarket counter in Houston. She never wore a nametag and I never knew her name. But I knew her. We were kindred spirits.
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