As Barbara walks, and I trudge with my walker, to the car, snow falls—flurries unexpectedly float in the damp 9:30 a.m. air. Flakes fly as we head toward Greer, S.C., down Hwy. 101 to the office of Dr. William Parshall Huntington, foot-and-ankle specialist of the Steadman-Hawkins Clinic of the Carolinas, located in the Greer Hospital complex.
“It won’t stick,” Barbara says about the snow.
We had endured two weekends of the stuff: first, ice and sleet, then about four inches of snow for the next weekend.
“I think you’ll have to live with it,” Dr. Huntington says of my left Achilles tendon, torn last fall. It had not healed, there was scar tissue, and to correct the issue through surgery, there would be a long difficult recovery. “As long as you don’t have pain …, “he says.
I feel OK about his decision. I am waiting for my right knee to be replaced by Dr. Brayton Shirley, of the same clinic, on April 1, 2026. He replaced the left one a year ago.
I drive us to Greg’s Barber Shop. I usually go three weeks between trims, but snow caused me to stretch my visit to four weeks. Brian meets me at the door before 11:00 a.m. I am his first customer of the day.
“Greg was busy all day, yesterday,” Brian says. “I reckon he got all the snow business.”
Greg Barnes, the shop owner, who works by himself on Wednesdays, had a bumper-crop day. Brian is off on Wednesdays. He mentions that the snow days hurt their business. I wonder if his wife’s job will make up for his financial shortfall.
“Take a good bit off and taper a little in the back,” I tell Brian.
Several customers enter the shop while I am in Brian’s chair near the front door. Greg comes out of his curtained office and says, “Next.”
Greg is a little younger than I am and lives near us in the Blue Ridge area of Greenville County. He lives next to where the new branch of the Greenville County Library opened (near Few’s Chapel Methodist Church, intersection of Few’s Bridge Road and Hwy. 101). Barbara says she had to take her children to a Greenville County Library bookmobile that came there when they were young, as there was no library in her area. Barbara and I haven’t been to the new library, yet, but plan to visit.
Brian finishes my haircut and shaves the back of my neck. That shave beats out the “Great Clips” places that offer lower “special” prices. Most of them can legally only use clippers on the neck, not razors. Greg’s Barber Shop is old-style, a man’s shop where walk-ins get first-come-first-serve turns in a chair. Haircuts are $18. Tips are appreciated.
I leave the shop as Brian holds the door for me and my walker. I hope to get back to just using a cane after my next knee replacement. But I discovered at ATI-PT therapy that I have some balance issues too. I have watched some videos on “improving balance.” The balance thing comes with aging, they say.
I move to the car and wait only minutes before Barbara returns from Safe Harbor, which is a few doors down from Greg’s Barber Shop. She has two skeins of yard, a beige and a green, and a pair of earrings. She crochets.
We motor toward the Greer Walmart in the Greer Plaza, that includes Belk’s. Barbara spots a parking space next to one designated for “Police.” We take that one and find a shopping cart with a bad wheel. It get us to the store; I walk behind it to avoid bringing my walker along. Inside Walmart, I see three motorized riding carts! Yeah! Sometimes there are none. But today the cold weather has kept some handicapped people away. Barbara takes the shopping buggy, and I place my walking cane inside the shopping cage in front of the motorized cart. I turn the cart on as I sit down. I see it is “80 percent” charged and zip off toward the cucumbers, tomatoes, and green peppers, as Barbara opens hard-to-open plastic bags for each of those items.
We move through each aisle. We skip the refrigerated eggs because Michael Campbell brought cartoned eggs to Faith Temple’s prayer meeting last night, and we gladly took home a dozen.
We buy vanilla Oreos for Jack Robertson, who works, at times, in the garage out back of Barbara’s house. There are prunes, coffee creamer for Barbara, a bottle of honey, wheat bread, and other items. I park near the candy aisle and wait for Barbara. While she’s gone, a thin man pushes his cart near me.
“I can see you’re young because you have a full head of hair,” he said, commenting on my white hair that had just been trimmed.
“Well, I’ll be 79 in a month,” I tell him.
“I’m 82,” he says. He has on a ball cap. I can’t see his scalp to see if he has a “full head of hair.”
“Look what I’ve got,” he says. He has 12 Dark Chocolate bars in his shopping buggy. That’s all he has in his cart. “Dark chocolate is good for your brain. … Are you a local?”
“I am,” I say. “And you?”
“I came here about 35 years ago,” he says.
“I’m Steve. What’s your name?”
He takes off his gloves, and we shake hands.
“Joe,” he says. He told about working for General Mills and starting restaurants around the U.S.
“In Colorado, I had to draw plans for a highway lane, because the restaurant was to attract 18-wheelers, etc.” he says. He told about his brother-in-law dying last fall, and his sister dying in December. I wonder if he feels lonely and struck up a conversation with me, a guy sitting idle in a motorized store cart. He says his sister had a gift of naturally alphabetizing the letters in a word, something she did naturally.
“She was what they call an ‘alphabetizer.’ Say, you have the word ‘Oreo,’ she would automatically think e-o-o-r,” he said. “And she could do it with longer words.”
I wonder if that mental quirk of a “gift” could be part of some obsessive-compulsive behavior and might not always be positive. I surmise that his sister was a smart cookie, and he was grieving her absence.
Joe seemed like such a warm person. What had he chosen to strike up a conversation with me? Was he depending on “the kindness of strangers” to get him through tough times? I felt the urge to inquire about his eternal preparation.
“Do you believe in the Lord Jesus Christ?” I ask Joe.
“Yes, I do,” he says. “I watch Charles Stanley, a Southern Baptist, and another preacher every Sunday morning.” He said other things that hinted that his faith was real.
“It’s important to trust the Lord as we get older,” I say, thinking of his age … and my own.
Barbara shows up by my side. She looked all over the store for me, because she had gone on shopping while I lingered behind with Joe. I say, “This is my wife, Barbara.”
We soon part with Joe. He proceeds to a self-checkout area. We move to a lane where Barbara would stack goods onto a moving belt that leads to the hands of a checkout person. We wait behind several people ahead of us. I hope the ice cream isn’t getting soft. It seems some people ahead of us are having difficulty with their credit. As we wait, a young Walmart employee approaches us. She holds something in her hand and says, “He didn’t know how to do this, so I told him to pay for them and I would come back and give them to you.”
I recognize two Dark Chocolate candy bars and immediately know where they come from. I look past the checkout line we are waiting in. There, beyond the crowd of folk checking out, stands Joe with his shopping cart. He smiles and points toward us. I smile back and point toward him.
Dark Chocolate is good for the brain, Joe says. It’s good for the soul, too.
No comments:
Post a Comment