Too much to check out in a slow, sad checkout line

It’s never comfortable standing in a long checkout line, but this one was more uncomfortable than most.

My wife and I had gone to JC Penney because she wanted to pick up a few new tops, and when we went to check out we saw that the line was long and we would have to wait for a while.

But that was OK, because the woman in front of us had a little boy of about four years old sitting in her shopping cart, and my wife loves nothing more than to flirt with younger men of that description.

She made a few googly eyes at him, but he wasn’t buying it. She tried again, but he just turned his head. Some guys have pretty high standards.

“Oh, be nice,” his mother said. “She just wants you to smile back at her.”

No dice. His smiles weren’t for sale today.

And that’s when everything started to go wrong, because his mom thought it might be a teaching moment. “Well, if you won’t be nice to other people,” she said to him, “then why should anybody do anything nice for you?”

She reached into her shopping cart and held up a cup with action figures on it, which the little boy obviously expected to be going home with him. “If you’re not going to be nice, maybe we should just leave this here,” she said.

Nope. He was determined to call her bluff.

Except she wasn’t bluffing. As the line inched slowly toward the registers, she kept urging her son to be nice, but each effort was rebuffed.

When her turn came to check out, the little boy refused a last chance to cross the “be nice” line she wanted him to cross. So she put the cup on a shelf and pushed her cart toward an open register — and the boy began to scream.

I wanted to tell her that it was OK, that he didn’t have to smile back at anybody if he didn’t want to, but I didn’t say that. I would like to say that I kept my silence because I didn’t want to undermine a mother’s lesson…but that probably wasn’t the whole reason I stayed silent.

And she would probably rather have given up on the lesson, but she didn’t because she just wanted her son to smile and be nice…but that might not have been her reason for persisting, either.

Our reasons may have gone deeper than we want to admit because, for one thing, the lady and her son were black and my wife and I are white.

And I couldn’t help but feel that we were all trying way too hard to prove that we weren’t part of the racial ugliness that has rocked America to its core over most of the summer.

To make matters even more complicated, my wife was sitting in a wheelchair — reason enough for a little boy to react with confusion and discomfort. And also reason enough for a mother to dig deeper — maybe a little too deep — to teach her child a lesson about how to treat others who are different from you.

Any other summer I think we all could have laughed it off. We might even have gotten that little boy to smile despite his best efforts not to. But this summer we all seemed frozen and mechanical in our actions, locked into an ugly game of proving that we were all decent people who didn’t want to cross any lines of decorum, lines that seemed to be shifting beneath our feet so rapidly that you can find yourself on the wrong side of the line just by standing still.

With their business finished, the lady and her son left the store — the boy screaming, the woman embarrassed. The other shoppers — most of them white, but not all of them — stood silent as they left. Nobody said a word, seemingly afraid to dip a toe into a shifting landscape where anything you might say or do would be misunderstood and would only make things worse instead of better.

In the end, my wife and I left the store feeling sad for that little boy, because if none of the adults in that checkout line had any idea about what was the right thing to do, there was no chance that he would understand. All I know is that he went home with the feeling that his day would have been a lot happier if that old white couple with the wheelchair hadn’t shown up in line behind them.

And although my brain tells me that he probably wasn’t traumatized and won’t grow up hating the elderly, hating whites, hating disabled folks because of it, my heart says something else.

Because it’s just sad when a store full of grown-ups who want desperately to put their feet down in the right place can’t get there because they’re all trying way too hard not to step over a shifty line. It’s an uncomfortable summer for everybody when you want to do the right thing but you’re paralyzed to take a step for fear of crossing a skittering line.

Or maybe the line is jumpy because we’ve all been too comfortable standing still for so long, when we should have been moving forward.

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