I’ve agonized about what jobs I should work, what career path I should choose. I leave the store reflecting on how much trouble I’ve caused myself in the past two decades. A couple of decades of making everyone’s life better. I’m consciously releasing my shoulder blades from their insidious hooks of tension.Ĭlayton goes about his business in his easy way, until my groceries arrive. I’m softening around the flutters that invade my chest cavity. I’m breathing evenly, adjusting my posture so that I’m standing tall. I’m ignoring the tinnitus in both my ears and the fact that I badly need to use the washroom. My nervous system is one notch below anxious in other words, it’s only due to 25 years of breath training and meditation that I’m not lying on the floor in a paroxysm of psychotic rage right now. Clayton doesn’t seem flustered in the least. I look behind me at the 17 people shuffling their weight from one leg to the other, hanging on to this-and-that for processing. I’m thinking, I’m the one who should be apologizing. He casts a glance over at me to apologize with his eyebrows, since my order is taking some time to get here. The name means “clay settlement,” by the way. A perfectly genial person working a perfectly useful, practical job at an ordinary grocery store that feeds the people. I look closer at his name tag and see that Clayton’s been employed here since 2003. All this in a patient and friendly manner. He makes a call, fields another call, gently tells the caller that he wants to hear the entire story but will have to attend to it later because he’s got a hundred people needing things from him at the moment. He wears glasses and a short beard, nondescript clothing, a shop apron with his name tag. He has to make a PA announcement to whatever department so they can bring my order out.Ĭlayton is perfectly sedate about all of this. Now, he’s facing a rush-hour lineup of 10 people and I’m the idiot who wasn’t home when her food was timed to be dropped off, thus causing him more trouble. Clayton spoke to me on the phone earlier, in a calm and composed voice, reassuring me that my groceries had been brought back to the store and I could pick them up at any time or have them redelivered in the morning.
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