Girl
It was early afternoon, about 2:00 and I was with my mommy in the supermarket. I hung off of one side of the shopping cart, dangling back and forth and peering at the brand new grocery store around me. The marketing people at the VONS headquarters had apparently thought that they should change the look of a grocery store, just for the hell of it. And I guess that’s the way the world works. It was the same concept of these new 12 packs of soda. The “Cool Fridge Packs” as the label said. Of course, I never told my mommy that I could read it, because she seemed to have this idea that pretty girls can’t be smart and smart girls can’t be pretty. She’s too stupid to realize that it is society that makes it that way, not the innate structure of a girl. It’s pretty sad that me, her five-year old daughter, knew more about this than her.
I gave up trying to articulate my ideas to my mommy when I was three. Not that I didn’t have the verbal capabilities, I’ve been speaking since I was two, and, not to brag or anything, I could make a pretty good argument for a two-year old. If it was some 60 year old guy on TV saying this, she would listen to (but not necessarily understand) what he had to say, but I guess I’m about three feet too short to get that kind of respect.
We moved into the checkstand and my mommy started lugging all of her useless garbage onto the conveyer belt. I continued swinging around on the cart when suddenly the bagboy caught my eye. He slid the groceries into plastic bags, trying hard, but doing a barely adequate job. I stared at him for a minute. He was young, probably 17 or 18 years old, and looked a bit absent-minded. He didn’t look really bored, but he looked a bit disappointed at something. I think he was disappointed at his job. Not at his low wages or the lack of prestige in his line of work, but that a job like this was against his ideology. Hmm. Maybe he wasn’t a supporter of big corporations. It was this young bagboy that began my road to become the leader of the revolution to end capitalism and begin worldwide socialism. But that’s a whole different story.
He turned his head away from the groceries and saw me. He smiled, and said softly, “Hi.” Instead of responding, I hid behind the shopping cart and peeked over the top and looked at him. He smiled at this too, and looked straight in front of him, in the distance. He was staring, thinking about something. Something logical. Heck, maybe he was thinking about the same kind of things I usually think about.
We exited the checkstand and headed toward the front door, and the bagboy told my mommy to have a nice day and asked her if she needed help with her bags. She declined, so he waved goodbye to me and smiled. I waved back and turned around quickly.
Interacting with most people, I am convinced that they are barely thinking at all, so it doesn’t really spark many ideas with me about the processes of the mind, but when I saw him, it made me think about something. He was experiencing a whole different set of thoughts than me, and the world looks completely different to him than it does to me. We have different knowledge, different memories, different ways of linking ideas together. How can two such minds exist? How would the universe separate our minds from each other? There is no set of data anywhere constituting which mind belongs in his head and which mind belongs in mine. There couldn’t be, or else that would create an entirely different universe with the same dilemma, and it would turn into an endless paradox that doesn’t make any sense. Oh well, I guess my mind is the only one that exists then, and that’s all there is to it.
Damn, that makes me pretty lonely.
