"nobody knows, darling, nobody knows how they are loved..."

the local acme supermarket closed down a few years ago. or maybe last month. (i've never been any good at pinpointing specific happenings on a timeline.)

anyway, when i was very little, my mother and sister and i used to frequent that magical dietary menagerie for all of our grocerial needs. i loved those enormous speckled apricot-and-beige checkerboard tiles that lay flat beneath my small, light-up-sneaker-clad feet.

there was a particular employee there who would always smile and exchange a kind word with my mother, and tell a joke to and grin at my sister and me. his name was darryl, and he was big and happy and friendly and wearing an apron.

he stopped working at acme quite a while ago, and then the place shut down altogether. darryl became an old memory, like a ten-dollar bill in the secret winter-jacket pocket of my brain: forgotten, but soon to be gloriously, triumphantly rediscovered.

yesterday, in my english class at chesapeake, a discussion about jobs sprang up. this fellow named darryl, far older than the rest of the students in the class, mentioned that he used to work at acme. my heart jumped a bit before my brain had quite processed it, connecting the darryl sitting in my classroom with the darryl i used to see in acme, and a general sense of lightness and happiness and childhood nostalgia was suddenly injected into my chest and spread quickly until i somehow didn't really mind sitting in that darn class with that darn teacher who clearly didn't know where that darn comma really went.

i was, at that moment, standing at the deli counter, reaching up for the cookie with sprinkles on top that darryl was handing me, free of charge, just like always, out of the kindness of his happy heart.




oy vey, i'd so much rather write about the things that interest me than the things i'm assigned. like right now. you see? i sat down to write my essay for class, and this is what happened.