I should have known. These were unprecedented times.
That’s not entirely true, but we’ll go with it for simplicity’s sake.
At any rate, I was lucky to find it at all let alone in the very first location. I guess that and the elation from having my 92-year-old mother back home, having survived a series of terribly unfortunate events and nearly a month of isolated medical care (but no Covid) had my hubris humming. A 12-pack of single-ply Scott rolls, the most dreadful excuse for toilet paper ever created in this part of the world, was not what I was hoping for. It might as well be a 4-pack, seeing as we’d have to use three times as much to get the job done.
I turned the package over in my hands one more time before digging my heels in. Nope. I could do better.
The shelves in store number two had been picked clean and store three was bare as bones. By now I was across town from the scene of my rookie mistake. I detoured to buy the fried chicken mom had requested for lunch. When the young woman at the drive-thru window asked if there would be anything else, I quipped, “Any idea where a girl could score some toilet paper around here?”
She laughed one of those cashier laughs designed to distract people like me from the involuntary eye rolling, but then she changed course and offered the idea of a discount store just up the road.
On it like a bonnet!
It didn’t take long to navigate there and make my way to the correct aisle, where I found a cavern of emptiness. On both sides. How could I have been so foolish?
Dejected, I grabbed a bag of chocolates I’d not planned to purchase and headed towards check out. On my approach, I glanced down. There on the floor, and very nearly in my path, was a multi-pack of Angel Soft. I stared at it for several long seconds before looking up to check, carefully, over both shoulders. I fully expected someone with overfull arms, who’d dropped it without realizing, to rush in and reclaim it like a fumbled football. There was no one. I picked it up.
In the line ahead of me was a sunny woman with socially distanced celebration supplies—poster board, markers and such. She wore a bright yellow top, black polka-dot pants, and coordinating shoes on tiny feet. Across from her, a child and a man with a basket of groceries were checking out. Behind them, another youngster with a soda and a bar of candy. The woman paid for everything, hers and theirs. I’m sure I was smiling when she looked my way. How could I not? We exchanged pleasantries.
It occurred to me, as she walked away, that she was a shiny soul in conventional clothes, there for the sole purpose of doling out happiness. Angel, soft.
Events like these are familiar, whether or not we choose to see them as anything more than a fluke. Bathroom tissue might seem a low-watt miracle, but in that moment, it was precisely the gift I needed to be reminded that grace doesn’t have to be glamorous. When you miss the accident by mere moments, when you don’t miss the accident but survive, against all odds—that’s metamorphic. A pandemic toilet paper find not so much. But it’s these we are more likely to encounter and these, because they are so banal, we may be less apt to notice at all.
The fabulous Luisa Skinner at
recently asked the universe a weighty question: Should she continue writing? Though I’ve no doubt the response had already revealed itself in a thousand compliments and perhaps a singular shooting star, the unequivocal answer came with the news she’d won a give-away to participate in a writing immersion course (~$700 US value) with a best-selling author. She must keep writing.
I flounder beneath waves of my own uncertainty, as a writer and otherwise, and am buoyed by occasional comments that blow me away. I don’t think people know that some days, and there is little rhyme nor reason for when or why, their words are the difference between pressing on and giving up.
And here, at last, is my destination today, the place these thoughts have insisted I revisit. You see, I believed this funny pandemic experience was about appreciating the marvelous even when it’s unsophisticated. I thought the moral of the story was to look for the enchanted in the everyday, the metaphorical toilet paper in the aisle. It turns out, it’s not that.
Of course, I ought to notice when things like that happen, to expect them even. But all this time, I’ve been overlooking another angle: the angels.
What do I know? Maybe it’s gotten too expensive for the more experienced ones to travel. Maybe some of them have retired and their positions haven’t been filled. Or maybe they’ve lobbied successfully for fewer hours and more vacation time. Hard to blame them. But really, who’s to say someone like me--or her, or him, or you--isn’t exactly right for the job?
The point isn’t to look for the angels and the light they shine. The point is to be one.
~Elizabeth
A subtle message wrapped up in double ply... the whisper of butterfly wings, the softness of an angel's touch. There's never a post of yours that's not a keeper. Thank you.
“. . . the most dreadful excuse for toilet paper ever created . . . “
Not to detract from the inadequacy of Scott tp, but I know a thing or two about dreadful tp. There were places where it was cheaper to simply use the local currency. But in one country where we lived for quite awhile, they sold a locally produced bog roll we called John Wayne brand. It was similar to newspaper, except not as refined. Menacing individual splinters from the trees used to make it were visible and it had a hard, unyielding feel to it. Why John Wayne brand? Because it was rough, it was tough, and it wouldn’t take crap off nobody.