You can take America’s pulse in our supermarkets. Upbeat, fearful, hopeful: These emotions float in the aisles, along with aromas from oranges, coffee, and Stilton cheese. A while back, around Christmas time, we were waiting on line to pay, and chatted with a young woman about the cherries she had bought. After she checked out, the woman took the bag of cherries and, with a smile, popped it in our basket and walked away, shaking off our surprised protests. On the way home we kept talking about this generous present from a total stranger. We wondered if we had a saint in our neighborhood, and took to calling her “Our Lady of the Cherries.” Although we’ve looked up and down the aisles, we’ve never seen her again. We have something to give her in return.
Downtown St. Pete is turning into a mecca of supermarkets (not to be confused with megamarkets like Walmart and Costco). Between the large Publix at 4th Street and 38th Ave. N. and the smaller one at University Village on the south side, we now have Rollin’ Oats (2842 9th Ave. N.), The Fresh Market (2900 4th St. N.), Trader Joe’s (2742 4th St. N.), and Locale Market (179 2nd Ave. N.). Plus others; Jeanne and I don’t have time to stop at them all (a new one’s scheduled to be built around 700 Central). And occasionally we run out to Mazzaro’s Italian Market (2909 22nd Ave. N.) just to stand in front of its huge brick oven and murmur “ciabatta,” “focaccia,” “pugliese”…
These markets differ from one another, but the idea of a market being “super” is very American. They’re big, clean, efficient, and they deliver the goods. Naturally, they’re a major inspiration for our stories and poems. One of John Updike’s greatest stories, “A & P,” is set there. In Allen Ginsberg’s poem “A Supermarket in California,” he meets Walt Whitman by the meat counters. The woman in Randall Jarrell’s “Next Day” moves “from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All.” In place of Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Stephanie Brown has written her popular American “Allegory of a Supermarket.” My poem, excerpted here, began as a satire, but I wasn’t halfway through before realizing how fond I was of our supermarket. It was a learning experience.
Like our gas stations, our supermarkets have a tendency to cluster together, like athletes elbowing for the best spot on the court. Everyone goes there: the seamstress, the mayor, the engineer, the unemployed, the alcoholic; a surprising number of shoppers arrive in wheelchairs. They provide a microcosm of America, in various outfits from formal jackets and ties to near nudity with tattoos, passing by the friendly checkout workers and smiling packers.
Sometimes this is unnerving, just standing on line and idly looking around. The magazines are Woman’s World, National Examiner, Star, the Enquirer, People, In Touch, Women’s Lifestyle. Their headlines blare “Liz Taylor Died Broke,” “Whitney’s Daughter Suffocated,” “Kate Rushed to Hospital,” “Perfect Family Shocking Murder,” “Leonard Nimoy’s Secret Agony,” “Oprah Fat Again.” What makes one nervous is that these choices have been made after careful polling of the tastes of most buyers. Apparently, no one impulse-buys The Nation or The New Yorker.
There’s an un-American word to describe this: “Schadenfreude,” a German mouthful meaning the delight we feel when other lives aren’t a bowl of cherries.
Life may be the pits for the rich and famous, but we’re still looking for Our Lady of the Cherries, who cheered us up with her holiday gesture in our supermarket. We’re hoping she may read this, and get in touch.
This article appears in May 7-13, 2015.