Another Loss

It seems my year of loss is continuing. Thankfully the year is almost over. My grocery store is for all intensive purposes closed. The last official day is the 28th. I began going to this store when I moved to Illinois the first time in 1987. It was the place, borrowing from the Cheers theme song, where everyone knew my name. Naperville is not a small place, nearly 150,000 people, so having a place that was a small community was wonderful. I would write out my list by the aisles and as I went through the store, I would visit with different people. I knew when Scott's dad died and what a great man he was. I will miss hearing about and seeing photographs of Rita's twin grandchildren who are due in January. I remember Alex's first day of work twenty-six years ago and how he let me sit in his brand new PT Cruiser. Now some anonymous person will bag my groceries and probably not remember how I like them packed. I will miss Kevin who loves telling the check out person that "No, she doesn't want me to take her groceries out for her, she wants me to come home with her and put them away." I never tired of this joke told over and over nor did he ever tire of sharing it. I could go on and on but you get the idea and I get too said.

It saddens me that we are so in need of making a profit that we don't think about the bigger picture. As of Saturday, 6,000 people will be unemployed in the Chicago area. I am fortunate because I have choices about where I can shop. This is not true of many people in the city especially those on the south side. And so I am sad. I did not get to say good-bye.