The store is a little more tense these days. New management and a new district brings with it new and unfamiliar ways and rules to both the front line staff and the customers who come in each day. Like most everyone else, the economy has had a difficult impact on each of us and has supposedly demanded that hours be cut. The people I work with work hard and the pay is really not enough to survive on...having hours cut makes that even more difficult. We all walk with the knowledge that corporate has the "upper hand" right now...and can get away with more than normal in their treatment of staff.

Still...it is the customers that make it more than just a job for me. Yes, I constantly have my eyes open for a job that will pay more and be less physically demanding for my aging and somewhat wounded body. But I want one that will also bring these "moments of intimacy" I so cherish and learn and grow from. Like today...a young, white woman, came to my register. While she looked somewhat reserved, she also felt quite up-beat. She followed several parent/child customers who had purchased special items for a school field day or just for the end of school in general. All the kids seemed lighter than usual today...summer is coming and with it perhaps expectations of less pressure. They didn't even look as tired this morning as they have on other days. I hope some at least are feeling this...it has been a tough year and, depending on your politics, a wonderful year...but no matter what, the kids get the trickle down effect in ways I think adults can and do easily deny.

Anyhow, when this young woman reached my register she was carrying with her 12 notebooks...the "composition" kind that many of us may be familiar with from our own days in school or journal writing or trying to organize one thing or another. Smiling, I said to her that she was either going to do a lot of writing or she was giving out an assignment to her students to keep a journal over the summer. She smiled and said I was partially correct...the composition notebooks were for her 8th and 9th grade students who she would be going to Rhawanda with this sumer. A "wow" came out of my mouth...a "wow" because I thought how awesome and a "wow" because I am continued to be amazed and awed at the people who come before me each morning...who they are and what they do. She said she wanted to help them prepare a notebook so that they would be ready to start recording their memories of the trip, which will be for three weeks and will start a few weeks after school gets out. She began to get so excited about what awaited them...it would be her first trip to Rhawanda also, although not her first trip chaperoning students to other places in the world. I told her to take lots of pictures and then, have them developed at the store so I could see them. She smiled and said OK and waved good-bye and once again I felt gratitude for being allowed into the life of another...her pending adventure...and the different paths each of us walk. Her trip lingered in my mind a bit as I imagined her and the twelve students getting ready to board the plane...the parents letting them go...the combination of anxiety and excitement playing out individually in each of them...the time difference...the land difference...the cultural difference and the many ways it could, however differently, impact each of them for the rest of their lives. May they each be blessed with openness!