I go to this particular grocery store for a particular thing every eight days or so. It’s across town, in the next town, really. It is 10 miles away and takes 20 minutes, if you’re lucky. You navigate the pot-holed parking lot, park, go inside and back to the front left corner to the refrigerated section. It is a small store and I’ve never seen more than two of the registers open. There’s never been a line of more than two people waiting to checkout.
The Salvation Army sets up during the holidays outside, of course. And the girl scouts are there every now and then. Once I visited while the local food bank was taking donations. I bought some things and gave them to the people manning the food bank table and you’d have thought I gave them the winning lottery ticket. It’s a little country town, really, just stuck on the northside of this other little town, a town which happens to have a world-class university at its center. You wouldn’t know it to be in this next town, or in this tired little grocery store. It’s perfectly fine, but it needs an update. It is always clean, but the white floors and the fixtures have an age to them to make it feel a little scuzzy, somehow.
Or maybe it’s some of the shoppers:
This is the fourth time I’ve moved someone’s cart out of the handicapped spot. I’m only there once every so often for four or five minutes, but I’ve done this four times. It is a little thing that, one supposes, happens all the time, which makes it a big thing, which makes it something more than inconsiderate.
This afternoon I produced another oral history. This one featured Dean Gerardo Gonzalez. He’s a dapper fellow, exceedingly and unfailingly considerate and polite. And he looks good in a bow tie:
He’s semi-retired, and is now technically a dean emeritus, but he’s still teaching. And these days taking students on trips to his native Cuba.
Gonzalez has had a full career, as you might expect of a man who has reached such a standing. He’s an expert on alcohol and drug education. He’s worked at Miami and at Florida and has supervised different programs at all six of the IU campuses. But his full story is a fascinating one. I wish you could hear it. You can read about it. His memoir came out late last year, and has been well received.
Today he told the story about how his parents brought he and his sister to the U.S. from Cuba in 1962. It was three years into Castro’s revolution. Those were the last days when you could still come directly here. The process was this: You applied for an exit visa, if it was approved, the state would come and inventory everything you owned. You could use it, but it all now belonged to the state. Then, at some point after that you’d receive a telegram telling you your visas had been approved. You had 48 hours to leave.
Gonzalez was 11 years old, and said he remembers a great deal of commotion. They swapped out his parents’ good mattress for his grandparents’ bad one. The state owned a mattress, but a mattress is a mattress to the state. He said his father had $40, but got scared of trying to carry that much. They bought two bottles of Bacardi rum.
It was the four of them, a man, his wife and two kids. They had the clothes on their back, five bucks, two bottles of rum and virtually no English. That’s how they came to America.
That’s the story that sent me into the weekend.
