Many Moons

My First or Second Sign

 The Publix grocery store was overrun with looters so Mona and I went to Dunkin' Donuts instead. Distant screams and screeching tires warned against going out in public but we were hungry. Gunshots popped across the parking lot at the Home Depot hardware store.

"I thought you said people weren't rioting?" I asked.

"That's what CNN said."

"Huh."

The donut shop was all windows but being indoors, among the coffee and crullers in civilized air conditioning, felt like we were back in normalcy, protected from the mayhem without. I ordered my regular iced coffee and a blueberry cake donut and checked on an elderly woman who looked like she may have fallen down or been hit by a car.

While I consoled the woman Mona went through a medical survey.

The blood, she told me, wasn't always a reliable barometer of injury in old people. They were usually on so many blood thinners and pain medications that they either bleed way too much or not at all and often weren't aware of how they really felt about their injuries.

The woman wore a housecoat, slippers, and the kind of disposable nylon stockings they give you at shoe stores to encourage you not to try on the merchandise barefoot. She also sported a thick Brooklyn accent but from what I could understand her name was Rita and she had been attempting to horde at the nearby Costco when patrons, climbing the racks that the humanity-swamped forklifts couldn't get to, started tipping pallets off the shelves and onto the floor below. Customers were scurrying for whatever fell to the polished concrete like sugar-starved eight-year-old children scrounging for stale candy underneath a torn piñata.

Rita had been clutching three industrial-sized cans of Que Bueno nacho cheese when she saw her husband take a falling pallet to the cranium. His head erupted like...well... also like a piñata, just without the treats.

Rita was still clutching one remaining can of nacho cheese in her hand, pondering it like it was Yorick's skull.

While Mona finished her exam I finished buying fifty separate one-pound bags of coffee and all of the available crullers for me and Munchkins for her and Faruk.

The old lady at the counter looked at me, perplexed that I was buying so much coffee.

"Now there's something you don't see every day." She said out loud, but not necessarily to me.

One would think that the problem during an apocalypse would be a lack of resources. While this is true, the bigger problem is the lack of good customer service. Most grocery and convenience stores had been abandoned by their seventeen-year old, minimum-wage labor, which led to mob mayhem.

Dunkin' Donuts, however, was so successful as an organization because they had an aggressive policy of hiring the elderly, of which Florida has an almost limitless supply, and paying them minimum wage, with benefits. Old people have a better work ethic, are more reliable, and a lot less likely to abandon their post during something as disruptive as Armageddon. In fact, many of them had nothing other than their jobs to live for so they'd be damned if they were going to die in their homes, alone, without someone to complain to.

"Think the world's ending?" I asked the elderly woman behind the counter.

"I've been saying that for years." She told me.

I unfolded and unzipped the oversized duffle bag that had previously stored my lacrosse equipment. Everything fit comfortably and, slinging the hefty pack over my shoulder, we left the store.

As we exited the building and walked across the parking lot I saw my first sign, or maybe the second, that things weren't quite what they appeared to be.

"I hope Rita will be okay."

"I hope we make it back home," I replied, adding, "How do you think Rita felt when she watched her husband die like that...with the cheese?"

"What do you mean?"

"Everyone dies. I get that. But with Rita, no matter how tragic her and her husband's defeats or how great their triumphs in life, his last moment was getting crushed by a pallet in a warehouse free-for-all."

"When your number's up your number's up."

"Yeah, but hers isn't up yet. And her last moment with him was spent crawling on the ground, prying cans of simulated cheese product away from strangers while her husband was crushed to death. That's the prism through which they last saw each other on this mortal coil."

"I don't understand what you're getting at. Are you talking about the futility of death?"

"No. I'm talking about the dignity of death. If you die in front of me, I'd be crushed, figuratively speaking in this case, but I would hope you go well. I hope, if I have to see you die, that it's... I don't know... valiantly. Or quietly. Just not absurdly."

"What about humorously? That seems like a nice way to go. Maybe slipping on a banana peel."

"That's vaudevillian, not humorous."

"It would still be funny."

"Yeah...maybe. Way later."

"I'd rather people think of me dying and have a good laugh, wouldn't you?"

"I don't know," I said as we sat in her Jeep, watching cars speed past at reckless speeds in both directions. "There was a Brazilian priest named Adelir de Cardi, who died a few years ago. He was an experienced skydiver and he wanted to break a world record by strapping a thousand balloons to a lawn chair."
"What?"
"He was trying to raise money to build a spiritual rest stop for truckers."
"Bullshit."
"No. It's not. He was trying to fly for over 19 hours. He even practiced and completed a 4-hour flight where he went something like 17,000 feet up."
"So what happened?"

"Well, on the big day he set off and went up to almost 20,000 feet before losing contact with the ground. He had a parachute, thermal flight suit, food, water. He even had a GPS system and a cell phone in case he got into trouble. But it turns out that he never learned how to use the GPS and as he started floating out over the ocean, someone on the ground was trying to talk him through the GPS directions, so they could find him. He spent so much time talking to them that he wasn't able to parachute and the battery died on his cell phone.'
"Did he make it?"
"They found the lower half of his body floating in the sea a couple hundred miles from shore."

"Well, the first part is hilarious. But then it gets sad."

"It gets worse. Adelir's brother was the guy on the other end of the cell phone, desperately shouting GPS directions to try and save his brother as he floated out over the sea. It was crazy, and stupid, but at that moment, when the phone cut out, I bet they both wished more than they had ever wished for anything in their lives, that they could just stop time. Stop and go back to when they were kids and start over. Forget about being a priest, and truck stops and all of that, and just live."

Mona was quiet for a moment, introspective.

"Man. That's awful." She said, looking down at the ground, her voice quavering.

"Yeah."

"I mean... how much does God hate truckers?"

I blurted out a laugh and noticed she was only looking down to hide her grin.