Comber's Market

March 30, 2020

Greetings from a lifelong student,

The manager, Mr. Dandineau, wore a white apron folded over his generous stomach.  A narrow tie, usually adorned with a modest tie clip, was tucked into the apron.  His hair was Brylcreemed to his scalp in a neatly combed cap; somehow he fancied himself a suave darling to the housewives who shopped the store.  He would shout to me “Dairy!” which meant there was a truck for me to unload.  I would leave whatever I was cleaning or putting away and bang through the swinging doors to the back room.

It was a neighborhood grocery store, nested in among houses, small streets lined with homes tucked so close that you could hear the neighbor’s snoring.  It was a different time, when each patch of the city was served by its own grocery, and ours was Comber’s Market.

A semi truck would be threading into the tiny space where we took in the products that would feed the people around us.  There was no loading dock, just a door, which I stood in as I watched the huge truck maneuver between cars and curbs to ease next to the building.

Bill was a squat man, short cropped hair over swarthy skin.  He wore a work uniform with ‘Country Fresh’ on the back, and over the pocket his name was embroidered in script.  He would swing his short, bandy legs down from his cab and rock toward me, pulling on his leather gloves. “Hey Smitty!” he’d say, his voice a coarse rasp.  He would follow with some wisecrack he had learned in the Navy, aimed at making me blush, and for years was successful.

Bill talked all the time.  If he wasn’t talking to me, he was talking to the cases of milk, telling them they were getting off here, or  “You wait in the back, you, I will come to you later.”  He would zig zag in the trailer, bullying the heavy stacks into place.

I would stand at the tail of the semi-trailer and watch him slide the cases around on the metal floor.  He carried a hooked handle, just like the one I had, used to snag a stack of milk crates, spinning them around like a dancing partner, his gum sole boots squeaking on the wet floor.  Sometimes he would sing songs, some he made up, racy parodies of music he’d heard.

Pulling the crates of milk to the end of the truck, where I would pull them off, thirty two pounds at a time, stack them on a dolly, wheel them to the cooler, go back and repeat, thousands of pounds of milk and sour cream and cottage cheese.

While I hustled the crates into the walk-in coolers, Bill would pull off his gloves and tuck them in his belt, and then walk back into the meat department.  This was a forbidden area for mere mortals, but Bill sauntered in with the boldness of James Bond.  He would flirt with one of the meat cutters, who I will call Betty, not to protect her innocence, which was questionable, but because I cannot remember her name.  She was married to another butcher who was not always paying attention, a sinister looking man who wore a pencil thin mustache.  It was an interesting drama to watch, which I did, but only out of the corner of my eye. 

I would hook the empty metal milk crates, eight high, and drag them outside to the tail of the trailer, lift them in a clean jerk up above my shoulders where Bill would hook them into the trailer and sweep them away.  We worked until our clothes were wet with our own sweat and the sweat from the weeping dairy packaging.  We would sit on upended milk crates and drink chocolate milk that had ‘broken’ open.  And then he would poke my ribs and give me some raunchy advice and swagger back to the cab of his rig.

The owner of the store was Mr. Comber, an enigmatic man, haunted with alcohol, a mercurial temper, and a bizarre humor.  My most lasting image of him was seeing him stand behind the bakery counter, dressed in a bloody butcher’s smock, holding a revolver, glaring at some African American teens he expected to shoplift.  Some nights he would call the store from the Shorthorn, his favorite watering hole, and rage at whoever answered the phone, giving orders for the pleasure of giving them.  In another time he would have been the tyrant of a ship that was lost to mutiny.

John Dandineau would stand at the front of the store, smoking.  When he was talking to customers, he would cup the cigarette behind him, an act of gentlemanly deference.  He was a dandy of sorts, even in a tiny grocery store, wearing shiny shoes, and a short sleeve dress shirt with his monogrammed initials on the pocket, ironically lined with pens.  Sometimes when friends visited, he would go to the cashier stand and ring an electric bell three times.  This was the signal for me to come to the front to bag groceries. I had been trained that it meant immediately.

Wherever I was I literally dropped what I was doing and ran full tilt for the front, careening around corners, slipping past shopper’s carts, pouring it on as I blew past the bakery counter, then skidding to a stop at the checkout.  John would do it just to show people how fast I ran.  He would laugh when I got there, and say “That’s all right Smitty, just go back and mop produce.”

I spent winters and summers bagging groceries, hauling them to people’s cars, sometimes to nearby houses.  People were typically kind, but for the most part I was an invisible cog in the grocery process.  I would put their sacks where they asked them, the eggs stacked on top, nothing crushing the bread, cans in the bottom, and sometimes they would offer me a coin.  I would run around the parking lot and gather up carts and push a train of them back in the store and begin again.

There was Ed O’Malley, a man too old to be bagging groceries, even as he ran the little produce department, who was as kind as Mr. Comber was cruel.  I see his signature bowtie, hitching his pants like Jimmy Cagney, making little jokes with a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth.  A short order cook with Navy tattoos and a gift of gab, somehow lighted in a little corner of shelves lined with perfectly fronted canned goods.

A woman who showed me how to trim lettuce, the bakery ladies who helped me learn to slice bread and box up donuts and weigh the sliced lunchmeat and clean the whole mess.  The wine salesman with a limp, the chips delivery guy who left free things for the baggers in the back room.  Each had stories extend behind them, real life living.  Someone’s mom, someone’s uncle or grandparent or brother, someone paying taxes and filling the gas tank and making their way.

I was barely a teenager when I started working at the grocery store, and up until then my view of grown-ups was essentially my parents.  To me, these people were caricatures of adults, strange actors playing parts of mature people.  But I was there long enough to see a glimpse of what real life was for my neighbors.  Soon I formed an image of people making their way in the world, full grown, card-carrying regular people.  Some lost, some happy, some struggling, some filled with joy.  All worth seeing, some worth knowing and avoiding or knowing and knowing more.

It set the table for me in some ways, this daily sampling of the world beyond my family’s front porch.  It was an introduction to being with people, to accommodate them, or not, to learn from them, if that were offered, and to admire them or not, as I learned the difference.

My mother would say I learned my work ethic there, but it was more than that.  It was my first taste in creating opinions that were not created for me, it was the place where I saw adult humans behave, and formed my own response to that, and decided if it fit with my own beliefs.

The reason this came to me is because I realized recently I am still learning those lessons.  In a way I am relieved that the teaching goes on all my life.  It also reminds me that from time to time, there is someone who is watching me and maybe forming lessons there too.  For both reasons, I am sitting a little straighter.

Hope this finds you aware,

David

Copyright © 2020 David Smith