At the corner of commerce and human emotions, South State Street and East Roosevelt Road, a Walgreens store. I joined a long line of patrons patiently waiting to check out at the counter served by one clerk with my one bottle of Calcium 600+ D. I stood where the line broke into an aisle, a junction point for camera/photos to my right, the back of the store behind me, and candy to my left. Several people joined the line behind me.
We were now a human snake. Movement was beyond slow. My thoughts rippled over recent news of Walgreens profits (up, record sales, and yet it felt like Walgreens, the store I was in, was down), the recession and the likelihood that store staffing had been cut to a minimum. It was just after lunchtime.
A man came out of the next aisle with candy just as a group of women with an enormous baby buggy pushed in the door from outside. There was a young woman with a baby in her arms, another pushing the buggy with another child, another young woman and an older woman, maybe in her 40s, very short who spoke very quietly. The women confronted the man, stopping him in his tracks with the buggy.
The teen with now sleeping baby in her arms showed her to him, saying something like: “She’s my baby.” Their voices accusatory and firm: how could you say things like that? As though the words that had been said on the 29 northbound bus had cut the baby. They were clearly wounded, angry yet puzzled. Why were these words thrown at this baby? The man said: “It wasn’t me. I didn’t say nothing.” The boldest, the teen with the baby, asked: “Was it the guy in the tan hat?” He said, “I don’t know who it was, it wasn’t me.”
The women suddenly backed up the baby carriage and, murmuring to each other, left the store. A voice arose from the end of the line: “People today need to get their priorities right.” They got off the bus to pursue an argument? Heads turned back to see who was speaking.
“It’s just like my preacher said on Sunday,” she said, adding something about “people are just too sensitive today, you can’t look at them without starting something” and she threw in the recession for good measure. The tenor of talk turned to stress (the stress will only hurt you, was my weak offering) to not sweating the small stuff, from a woman who had a copy of the book in her bag. Heads nodded in agreement.
Then suddenly there was the man in the tan hat, bags of candy in hand, looking for the end of the line. The man said he’d gone to Jewel for candy but the prices were too high. So he’d come to Walgreens, just in time for the tail wind / the wrap up of this community’s opinions on what they thought they’d seen. “You just missed them,” the first man said. “What, they came here?” Tan hat man, a handsome young guy, said with disbelief. “Oh man.”
“We heard all about it!” I said with a smile.
So he started explaining how the baby had started crying and the bus was crowded when some man said something about needing to give the baby a bottle, didn’t no one know how to take care of babies anymore, and then something got said about babies raising babies and choices made. Maybe it was one mouthy man; maybe one man became a whole chorus of pejorative voices. The words were ugly and cutting.
I thought how hurt the women must have felt, and now I was proud of them, they weren’t taking it. They were standing up for themselves. Suddenly the line had moved and it was my turn to register my purchase. If there was more to the story I missed it. But I thought about how we each had come up with a story to explain what we thought had happened.
Words among strangers on a bus had led to an anger so huge that it had propelled people off the bus to settle a score. They had pursued two men into a store! A busy store! The first man had spread his arms out in a gesture of innocence and said it wasn’t him. The women’s voices dropped. Maybe they noticed the line of women watching them. They seemed to accept the man’s assertion that he hadn’t said the Cutting Words.
But the witnesses could see where this could have gone, too often goes. I could see that this sort of thing played out too often in the lives of those young mothers. The women were too vulnerable to the words. If this is happening on a bus among strangers, imagine what’s being said in their churches, their neighborhoods and among their cohort? And these strangers, men and women, were didn’t mind speaking out to other strangers about their choices and behaviors, and they didn’t mind passing judgment.
I’ve seen emotional eruptions on the bus too. In fact it was a 29 bus southbound out of the Loop on a midafternoon in late summer. A woman sitting in the rear of the bus didn’t like a profanity that came out of another passenger’s mouth, so she took it to the bus driver who stopped the bus, walked all the way to the back to tell the other woman to refrain from using that word. But then he added that he’d put her off the bus if she didn’t. That took the temperature over the top. The profane woman had more to say. People around her weighed in, very loudly. It seemed kind of amusing, yet not.
The too-sensitive-to-hear person was willing to ratchet up after the fact until another woman, enormously obese with a voice to match, began to harangue even more loudly about the Right Not to Hear Words Like That. The bus moved on, the other voices didn’t contest the haranguing voice.
In my corner of the bus, the man next to me and the woman in front of him and I agreed that people needed to lighten up. “You think of the people in New York City being like this,” said I, “but I was in New York recently and the New Yorkers struck me as a lot mellower than the people you meet on the streets and buses of Chicago.”
And then we began to talk. He was a musician in town for the jazz fest and hoping to sit in. I was just going home after attending the opening session of the fest. A friendly bridge of words formed between us.
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