Milk and Honey

I saw a wingless thrush

pushing a grocery cart in a store. 

The songbird, she sang lovingly,

a song I've never heard before.

Those words came to me and I scribbled them in the car on a grocery receipt. I thought to go back, to see her again, but I could think of no suitable reason to do so outside of the wild and preposterous thought that she and I were meant to be. That she, of all people, was the one for me. I could spill all the groceries out on the backseat and return the plastic bags to the proper receptacle as I always meant to do. And maybe she would be leaving and I could say hello again and ask her at least her name because as it was, I had nothing but this feeling. Frantically, I thought, but nothing came. No grand idea or scheme that I've been so good at all my life. And the ominous shadow that cast over me was the reality that I had someone. I wasn't single and, thus, I had no business flirting with random women in the grocery store. 

But despite that realization, I drove slowly by the doors, hoping she would come out. Maybe I would accidentally hit her and it would be one of those bizarre love stories that makes the news, or that we tell our amused grandchildren someday every Thanksgiving, or maybe she would be riding her grocery cart through the lot the way I always do and I would pull over and give her my best Olympic grocery cart riding score. 9.5 simply because there is always room for improvement. Was she a grocery cart rider like me? Was she a hopeless romantic that would endure a broken leg from being accidentally hit by my car for lifetime of true romance? She might argue that her cart routine was flawless and playfully we would banter the way they do in those movies. But she was not there. There was only an old lady walking and a construction worker with one of those absurd neon shirts who frowned at me when he thought I was looking at him. The narcissist. Can't you see, Bob the Builder, I was looking for this nameless toothsome lady who I had a brief happenchance affair with by the spices and syrups? Don't meddle in my kismet. She is my wingless thrush! And whatever collateral damage there is, there is. 

Oh, what a feeling of loss and despair driving home! In a town of 45,000 people, it wasn't likely we would meet again. At least not for another 4 years or so by all probability and by then I'd be 48 and what would there be left of me? I might be bald and undeniably wrinkly so much so that no Rogaine or Ponds could ever remedy. And there was not a chance in the world she would be single then, if she was even single now. I thought of her as I drove slower than I've ever drove before, slower than I drove through a school zone full of handicapped kids or in a funeral profession where gloomy people relate slowness to reverence. 

I had Maria at home, I told myself. Maria. Maria. Maria. But there was no spark in saying her name suddenly. What fire there was had been extinguished. She was a good person. Intelligent. She made good money and didn't shirk on the bills. We had good sex when time and circumstance afforded it. She didn't snore or complain when I left the toilet seat up. She ate pretty much what I ate and was healthy enough, friendly enough. All I had to tolerate of was her dabbling in the occult. Her friends she called her "tribe" and her hinting that she might someday want to live on a commune with them in some mystical forest where everyone worships trees and totems and has orgies, I suppose. But I felt reasonably assured I could talk her out of it for the rest of her life, or that she would tire of being a nut someday, realizing that she was little different than those people she criticized who go to the trendy new church with the pithy hipster name like The Tree or The Well. The nouveau-Christian types. She was nuttier than any garden-variety scientologist, but we all have our flaws. 

I thought in a few days I'd forget the wingless thrush, who had the most beautiful song voice I've ever heard when I caught her serenading the soups. A beautiful smile and face and a soul you could feel as though it were as tangible as the avocados. But I didn't want to forget her. That was the problem. Still, I didn't want to betray Maria, either, because it was simply the wrong thing to do. Maria was once that way to me. Wasn't she? I sat at a red light on my way home, still wounded mortally by the failed chance encounter, trying to recall my history with Maria so to forget this nameless girl. But all I could do was think of her and replay the last 30 minutes in my mind which was a perfect theatre of her.

The opening credits rolled with me pulling into the parking lot. I stopped in to get salad and lettuce for my turtle. Then I thought to get soup and there I saw her turning into the soup aisle pushing her cart, smiling at me. She parked her cart behind me, seemingly looking over my shoulder and the fifty thousand blends of soup, when I heard her sing. She sang like a nightingale. Softly, not loudly at all. Under the tones of the stores PA. Their awful pop music. And I smiled selecting my tomato basil and putting it in my cart. I didn't say anything to her at first. I smiled and she smiled and we went our separate ways. It certainly would have been enough for me. A moment that dog-eared a page of my life, to be read and reread, until another appropriately took it's place. 

But I had fortitude then. I had resolve. I went to the other side of the store and chose things I didn't need to get away from her. Spend money I didn't really have to spend. I'd need them some day, I reasoned. I'd need them eventually. There was only one reason I was still in that store and that was to see her again. Yet, I tried to avoid her all at the same time. But then we crossed paths in the condiments and salad dressing aisle right beside the croutons who looked on in rapt interest. And as though someone else took over me, I spoke to her.

"You have a beautiful voice," I said. "That was you singing, right?"

"Oh, thank you," she grinned. "Yes. Probably. I often do it without thinking of it. I don't even realize I am, but, I am."

Words betrayed me. They abandoned me just then. They took a train to see their mother in some other town or they acted like disobedient children throwing a silent tantrum against me. My lips and throat were dry and I wanted to say something that wouldn't come out. Something that grabbed on to my teeth and wouldn't let go. We were stopped then, both in the same moment and time, completely still in our perfect shared place in the universe, pretending to look at things on the shelf that we weren't looking at. In my panic I smiled at her and pushed on. The wheel of my cart whined its futile complaint. But I didn't stop fleeing, though I wanted to. I wanted to say more to her. I wanted to ask her everything in the world I couldn't think up just then. I wanted to share everything with her, everything I knew, every bad joke, every life experience, evey opinion and belief, though she was still the perfect stranger. 

"You look very snazzy," she called as I trailed away, the wheel of my cart wobbling, squealing its brave resistance. I stopped by the crackers and turned to her and thanked her. But then my feet betrayed me and kept going. Stop! Please stop! My feet perhaps were disloyal to me because they were loyal to Maria. They had common sense and decency. You are with someone else, they spoke firmly. They are like my mother, my legs, my knees. They needle me. Maria is a good woman. She's a nurse. She makes good money. She loves you. She's a nurturer. That's what they all say. My friends, too. She is a good-looking woman. You could do worse for yourself. Stupid things like that. My girlfriends have all been like horses to them. Horses that they bet on, only they don't bet the farm. They don't bet a grand or two or three. They bet $5 and never more than twenty. If she pays off they make out. If not, who cares? It was probably the jockey's fault, anyway. And I am the jockey. 

So I went on and put more things in my cart I didn't need. I looked at things for a long time. I read the ingredients on boxes, studied the nutritional content, scrutinized prices like a real wise shopper. All because I was waiting for her to come down my aisle, fooling my body to believe I was looking for deals or healthy food. I was hoping she would find her way to me as she had finally after so many years. If she came this time, my rebellious heart declared to the rest of me, we weren't holding back. We were going for it. You don't get an opportunity like this very often, it shouted in a crowded hall. This is fate. This is the meant-to-be that has eluded me my entire boring life. That has came and went like a passing comet that I haven't been quick enough to see, much less to capture. My heart spoke like Patrick Henry. Like Thomas Paine. All of them rolled up in one ball of fiery and romantic rebellious blood rhetoric. A heart that had been shattered and pieced back together and shattered again so many times its resiliency was astounding. The revolution was upon us and this was the first colony. The first shot at Lexington. Betsy Ross was knitting a flag. 

It wasn't long before I saw her pass the aisle. I was in frozen foods suddenly realizing how many different frozen vegetables they sell in bags. Corn of 87 kinds. Some of the vegetables include noodles and rice, which are awful. Name brands, generics, store brands, family size, personal portions. I was suddenly overwhelmed.  She went the other way, I thought, and I was about to leave, finally. The British of me were about to win a decisive victory until she rolled back like a Panzer tank and came straight down my aisle as though she forgot something. As though, yes, on second thought, she needed something from this aisle. And I stood there still looking at Tuscany-seasoned brussel sprouts and Asian inspired red and green bell peppers face-to-face with my hopeless reflection in one of the glass doors of the enormous freezer. And she stopped behind me in the frozen fruits across the way and I heard her again, singing a song I've never heard before. The most beautiful song that was ever sung.

My heart did as it had vowed and took over. It rallied the Continental Congress and I turned and smiled and said over her shoulder that it definitely was her singing and that I admired her voice. And that I could never get tired of hearing such a voice as mesmerizing as hers. She must have saw me in the freezer door transposed on bags and bags of mangos and strawberries. On passion fruit and peaches. She grabbed two as she said thank you in such a way that invited me to say more. And she turned to me and smiled, yet again in her patience and persistence. The life exuding from her in bounds like it had from no other person I've ever known. It poured from every pour and shot from her eyes and enamored me to an extreme that was uncommon to my existence. All in the aisles of a grocery store. 

"I love to sing. It is my way to make myself feel at ease in a very uneasy world. And so I do. All day long. Not loudly, but softly, like a distant bird. Like a thrush. I am a wingless thrush."

"I suppose your arms are wings."

She looked at her arms and grinned in agreement, as though she thought for a moment that she could take flight as they were. "I suppose that you are correct, sir. Featherless and flightless they might be, but indeed they are wings of a sort."

I sighed or exhaled deeply. I am not sure which. "The flightless thrush, rather?"

"However you care to remember me. Yes. Flightless, though not limited." She spoke elegant words and we were in perfect harmony. Peanut butter and jelly like harmony. Milk and honey. I thought of my grandmother just then. When I couldn't sleep, it was always warm milk and honey. It was a cuckoo clock on her wall and the creak of her floors as she tiptoed across the rug to tuck me in on a sleepover. The sound of the teacup on the porcelain saucer. It was the ambrosial smell of her soft skin. Goodnight, my lamb. Goodnight. This was that sort of peace. 

"I don't know what I am doing." I admitted to her, gazing down at my grocery cart which was a despairing smorgasbord of randomness forgetting when or why I picked up the soy sauce.

And she replied, "I don't, either. Do any of us, really?"

Suddenly we were speaking of more than shopping. And it was a good opportunity to say something of significance. To ask her name, or to daringly ask her on a date, in some place more romantic than the frozen food section of Kroger's. But I didn't. I was happy in that moment that it was the way it was. That I was some birdwatcher who had walked the woods for forty years to see one such bird that suddenly perched on the branch of a nearby birch tree right in front of me. Who sang it's song and whose colors and tenor I delighted in, who was more perfect than I could have imagined. It wasn't for me to put in my pocket. And Maria at home certainly deserved more than me being here flirting with women at the grocery, even one I could argue that was one in a million. So I smiled at her and though we hadn't been introduced by name, I said, "It was a pleasure to meet you," in such a final way that it never truly weighed it's total worth until it had passed. 

And she replied the same and I felt the same of her words. The sudden finality of them torpedoed me. It was a pleasure beyond that words would suffice to account. And rather than watching her fly away, I walked away and let her be in her habitat the way that she was. The way that she belonged without me. 

I was checking out and rethought the whole thing. Never would I have imagined in such a call for rebellious love that I would be a drab loyalist to someone at home who I never truly matched with on the level I dreamed that I would, or that I wanted to. My heart said I deserved to be tarred and feathered. Maria was simply the horse I thought would win the race, but not the one I wanted to win. She was the steady one with the best odds that all the old ladies betted pennies on. The 2 to 1 favorite. Something my grandmother said came to me, something she may have had embroidered on a throw pillow before little kids in China did that for the high-end department stores, "Slow and steady wins the race." 

As I was checking out in the self-checkout I said that to myself repeatedly, though I didn't know what the hell I meant by it or how it applied to this. Maybe it would, like some things do, make sense later when I thought about it again. I saw her one more time breezing up the aisles and it looked as though she were looking for me. Maybe she would have said something greater had we to cross paths just once more. Maybe there was an internal struggle within her as well or maybe I thought too much of the bird and her simple pleasures. I looked away when we made eye contact, but caught a glimpse of her uncertain but hopeful smile. Her fare-thee-well eyes, perhaps.  

I got home and Maria wasn't there. I knew when I opened the door and there was only the dying light of yet another day that could not be tomorrow filtering though the dreary half-open drapes to greet me. And little figments of life dangled there, suspended in those weak rays that would soon be no more. There was no TV blaring. No radio or record player spinning our favorite records. No boiling water on the stove. No tick of the oven. No tumbling of the drier. No whispering of the upstairs shower. No eager footsteps across the floor and down the stairs to greet me. It was an empty and soulless place and I realized in my heart before I ever knew that which I soon would when I looked at my phone and saw the text I hadn't realized in all my excitement of my wingless or flightless thrush. Maria had written me a Dear John text which was about as incomprehensible as her enthusiasm for nature and mysticism. She said she experienced a life-altering moment with a man named Bear. It wasn't his real name, it was his chosen name and spirit animal, and Bear was a tax attorney and shape-shifter. And according to her most trusted tarot cards and tea leaves, he was her celestial soulmate. How could I possibly compete with someone who could be anything he wanted from a gerbil to a sperm whale? He understood her and she understood him and I had to stomach the last nauseating text or message about her tribe and fanatic dogma that I ever would. She would not be coming home.

Had I read the text when it was received, I would have still been in the grocery store and I would have had no conflict or loyalty to Maria and perhaps I would have been even more brazen in the wake of my sudden betrayal and, therefore, have asked the beautiful songbird I would see no more if she would go out with me, if I could see her again outside of those linoleum lanes of nosey sugar and gossiping tea jars and sacks of eavesdropping flour. Perhaps she might have said yes, and the entire course of my life would have been altered in that moment, the profundity of such, not lost on me. But as it were, here I was alone in a cold and darkening house with no way of ever finding her, placating myself only with possibilities of a sudden and newfound freedom I secretly longed for the way a caged bird longs and with the compelling arguments that such a beautiful woman with that voice had to be taken, engaged in some way or another, though she was ringless, I recalled. But surely there was someone at home and she was, undoubtedly, simply an innocent grocery flirt with no objective or motive. Just a happy social person whose intent I had misinterpreted. It is easier that way. To think of nothing lost than all. 

My freedom abounded, though it was tainted by the indomitable misery of loneliness which left an acrid taste in my mouth as though my soul was quietly poisoned. It was a bruised ego, perhaps, something that would heal in time. And so I unpacked my groceries and made myself a glass of warm milk and honey which didn't taste nearly as good as my grandmother's because it was never only milk and honey. There was a dash of vanilla and cinnamon, I think. I soon fell asleep with the thought, or rather, the hope that fate might be kind again to me tomorrow or whenever it sees fit. Maybe I would see her again somewhere. It is all I have left. A house and heart full of maybes as what picture I have of her slowly blurs in my mind, and as that receipt with that scribbled poem lies crumbled next to me the way Maria used to.