I like Jim who runs the local organic food store, Heaven On Earth, downtown. His fitting, friendly ‘WELL, HEL-LO THEERE!’, followed by snappy conversation about anything new with you is simply dandy. He could have been a radio broadcaster. Today, though, he wasn’t to be seen or heard. No sight of him slipping a tastier-than-thou orange or garden-of-eden cherry into my pocket to persuade my return for more.

Behind the cashier’s till is a woman of average shape, height, build. I’ve seen her before. Something is pleasant about her. The typical, expected, consistent way she portrays herself. I sense her holding something additional; a quirkiness that you can take somewhere, where you can take things with someone that might be odd and like you. I like her.

There is little space on the counter to put food items. The cash register and boxes of products are on the right. On the left, there are baked goods, cartons of fresh berries, and small items from the natural dispensary. I notice BUDS lip balm with its signature marijuana leaf emblem. An elderly woman steps into the store and picks one up. Nervously, as if to joke, she covetously exudes, ‘I heard this is good…’ I glance her way. She waits for acknowledgment. None comes. ‘I’m going to buy it!’ Our lack of intervention frees her. BUDS: for people of all ages who want to numb their lips so everything about them can feel the same.

I put my groceries on the counter space. The clerk takes them one by one, selectively, reaching here and there, in an order I can’t decipher the meaning of. She scans or weighs them, placing each item to the side, next to the items that haven’t been scanned or weighed yet. All the items are beside each other, without distinction, whether ‘bought’ or not. It seems confusing but neither of us gets confused. We keep going.

She packs the groceries carefully into my bags. Very carefully. Slowly. Surely. Surely, you wouldn’t want to hurt anything that’s going in. But more so. She is thinking something about each item, engaging with it, and thinking about other things, too.

‘That’s a lot of great groceries you have today!’ she beams. As if we might be seeing each other later and having a small party at my house. Or, she’s just excited that I have groceries in my fridge, like it was her fridge, too. ‘What are you going to have for dinner tonight!?’ Her speech is casually excited; possibly some fun is in store, or in the store. Interested in these things, she appears as a young girl. I relate.

‘Probably popcorn.’ I say. ‘Same as last night.’ She laughs out loud. It isn’t loud. There is an old gent next to me. He laughs out loud. The real thing. He is starting to put his grocery items on the counter next to my some bought, some not, items. Entanglement potentiality occurs. ‘Or maybe just celery dipped in this hummus.’ I touch the hummus container.

‘Yea, isn’t it just like that!? ‘She holds an inner gigglish expression, and a kind of gone-away look, as if her mind is slipping and skipping here and there. Thoughts prancing, while she stays with me, here.

Hers is a fragile, skillful, art, putting my groceries in the bags. She handles it like my mother’s non-existent fine china. It comes across as courtesy. But it’s not only about me. Gentle and proficient, like a child trying hard to pick her mother a birthday gift, driftingly touching this and that, wondering about it, and liking each item for exactly its own merit and her own reasons. She’s like that. Taking ever so long, blissfully so, to decide where each item should be placed in my old cloth bags. This one here, in this bag. That one there, in the other.

She comes to a few loosey-goosey items that can’t quite stand on their own, along with berries in open small cartons. The tall, heavy items have all been packed. The Stackers. She pauses. I think I hear her sigh, the tiniest gasp. She glances to the right, then left. Reaches for the first packed bag and looks inside. Then, back to the current problem at hand. ‘I’ll just support these on the side with the marshmallows,’ she says. She puts the bag of marshmallows to the side in the new bag with the loosey-goosies, packing them together.

‘I don’t know if you should do that,’ I say. ‘I can hear it now…’You know I’m a marshmallow, right??…” She laughs out ‘loud’. ‘Why did you put me next to these things? I can’t be used as support. I’m soft. You know I’m soft. Everyone knows marshmallows are soft…’

‘Yes!’ She follows and giggles. ‘That’s exactly what they’re saying.’ The old guy behind me doesn’t giggle, laugh out loud or smile. I glance his way and see he is pretending, trying, to be calm and is holding a chocolate snack in his hand.

‘I’m gonna hear it all the way home,’ I say.

She bows her head now, giggling ever so quietly. I use the moment to take the marshmallows out from the side of the bag where they are ‘supporting’ the sturdy items and lay them on top of the first bag of goods.

‘Marshmallows aren’t supportive,’ I hear in my head. ‘We’re not meant for that. Everyone knows that about marshmallows.’

I smile to myself.  Does she hear the marshmallow talking, too? She doesn’t give any indication. There is a pause and I watch for it. A moment occurs. The three of us feel it. Wait, perhaps she doesn’t. She’s the one we’re watching it happen to. It’s her moment. Then, she extends her hand to the old man for his chocolate bar. I can feel his frustration turned relief that he thinks he’s hidden in the form of patience.

I briefly wonder what she will have for dinner tonight. Popcorn?  Does she eat popcorn in a big bowl? Or is she one of those who think that that would be too much popcorn…even though it’s only 1/2 a cup, unpopped.

The marshmallow is happy in its bag when I put it in the truck. It sighs a very soft, pillowy sigh. It says pillow talk has got nothing on it. Nothing is quite like it, it says. Its content in the truck, all the way home.

Romeo tears open the bag of marshmallows for a night snack; reaches in and eats them one by one. Then the silence comes. Heaven is here on Earth.

‘Human beings are made angels on earth, not in heaven. At death,wherever one leaves off in his progress, he will have to start in again in a new incarnation. After sleep is the same as before sleep; after death one is the same as before death.’ ~Paramahansa Yogananda