So, a week ago, I started a new job working in the kind of clothing store that is best described as “quaint”. It’s located in a circle of similarly quaint stores, all facing each other and grinning sleepily. Everyone, the workers in the various little shops and customers alike knows everyone else by their first name, and also the state of their great-aunt’s health.
I’ve been introduced, over and over by my boss as “oh her? This is our cute new worker! Tell me, how old do you think she looks? Hahaha, right? Can you believe she’s actually 27?”
The bathroom does not have a door, but it does have a curtain. So far, I’ve been told, “Sure! You can take off your shoes, feel right at home”, been proposed to by a married old man, been plied with free homemade fruit soup by one of the other shop owners (I’m not sure what she sells, but the soup was tasty), offered fried Challah by possibly the same shop owner, and gently tapped on the foot by a friendly cat who was taking shelter under the rack of shirts I was sorting through.
On Thursday, I looked up from the shelf of children’s pajamas I was organizing to discover a potato on the counter next to the cash register. I shut my eyes tightly, blinked a few times and looked again. The potato continued to sit there in that placid, definite way potatoes exist. My boss walked in, and we locked eyes. I looked at the potato, and then back at my boss. I could feel the cartoonish question mark hovering above my head. The question hung between us, unasked, because I worried that if I addressed it, the potato would become more real. But potatoes are as real as anything can get, so eventually, I caved.
“Boss? Why is there a potato..?”
My voice trailed off into quavering uncertainty at which point we both burst into helpless peals of laughter. I’m still not clear on why the potato was there. Details will probably always remain fuzzy, but it seems an old men handed one of the nearby store owners a potato and requested that they make soup with it. An unknown series of events then led to the potato being transferred to our store.
Most of the purchases that day concluded with customers asking for a quote on the potato, and if they could get a discount on it because they had been shopping here since the dawn of time.
Later, I caught the tail-end of a conversation between an old lady, seemingly Potato Man's wife, and my boss. She was saying, “I know that you need more than a potato to make soup, but I keep forgetting what else to put on the list for him”. So my boss sat patiently with her, writing everything down while they mulled over ingredients.
By the end of my shift, the potato was still there, joined by an abandoned shopping list.
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