An Odd Interaction

I had a thought-provoking exchange with a lady at work today.  She came up and asked for tortillas, and I was all like, "Here, let me show you."  As we were walking over to the tortilla display, she started in: "You guys ain't got no vegan food out here!"  It was an accusation, not a question.

"Well, we do have a little," I told her.  "We have a health food section, and there are vegan things in it.  We can go take a look if you want."

"Naw, I ain't got time.  I'm on the road.  I'll just take these, and it'll have to do me."  Her voice was that really grating smoker's voice that always sets my teeth on edge.  She grabbed a package of white flour tortillas and started toward the checkstands with it.

"We do have things that are definitely vegan, in the freezer cases.  Well, I guess that won't really work if you're on the road."

"Naw, it won't.  I'm from California, and I ain't never seen anything like this.  This is just horrible.  I ain't never seen anything this bad."  What she was saying was kind of comical if you take the words by themselves, but she was one of those people with the unhappy talent of infusing her tone with such a depth of hatred and malice that I found myself taking up Utah's case.  (even though Utah and I are not friends)

"Well, I mean, this is a farming community --"  I began.

"Yeah, so there should be health foods."  She cut me off abruptly.  I wanted to explain that people here eat meat as a matter of course, because they are farmers, but I thought better of it.  She was too inexperienced.  She bleated on about how none of the states she has traveled through have any vegan food, and as we arrived at the checkstands she regaled me on how she never intended to come back to these parts, ever.

"Yeah, me too."  I told her and I turned my back.  I wanted to be finished talking to her.  Living here is already unpleasant enough.

I had kind of wanted to express to her that she had miraculously found the only person in the store who had been raised vegetarian, and who understood where she was coming from, and didn't think she was weird.  But she would have none of it.  (When I related the incident to a couple of cashiers who were standing in front of their registers waiting for customers, both of them had to ask me what vegan meant.  That's where we are.)  But, at least at walmart, I've come to really like the people I work with.  A lot of them are very simple people who live on farms and who work at Walmart to earn some extra money on the side -- an astonishing feat, since farming is, at least in my perception, widely known as one of the most difficult lines of work in the world.  These people have been putting in their crops during the spring planting, and now they go home from work and help tend the farm.  When harvest season comes, their workload will be staggering.  Many are college graduates, and many are college students who can't hear the message their coworkers are sending them, that their course of study won't help them raise their class, because they are so desperate for a better opportunity.

But I digress.  I was pondering these things while I uncomfortably waited for the lady to finish buying her tortillas and get out, and I realized why I resented her.  She was so obviously a lifelong smoker.  Her frustration rang hypocritical to me because she clearly succumbed to the nicotine monster every day.  Everything about her was tobacco colored -- her hair, her prematurely aged skin, her fingernails, her gravelly voice.  But she loftily refused to look at our back country health food section because she was so positive it wouldn't be healthy enough for her.  

Not that I resent her trying to be as healthy as she can, while she works on her issues.  And I have no problem with her veganism in general, except that she sort of seemed to wield it as a weapon of superiority over us hicks.

Had she given me the opportunity, I would have been the first to commiserate about how abyssmal Walmart's produce is, and I would have directed her to another store for better health food -- Smith's Marketplace, for instance.  But I didn't get that far.  She didn't give me that chance, so...whatever.