News in a small town travels fast. It wasn't long until I was offered a job at the local grocery store. The original owners of Ditter's store were relatives. I believe the original Mr. Ditter was my paternal grandmother's uncle or great uncle. The names and interconnections of relatives was a language that my grandparents and my parents spoke well. It's not a skill that has transferred to the next generation. We are less defined by our past and from whom we descend, at least in our conscious world. Unconsciously, I suspect the connections are as strong as ever.
As a child, my father learned enough German to figure out what his mother was saying to other women. They would switch to German within ear shot of the young if they wanted to talk about something adult like someone being pregnant. My dad blew the lid off this ruse one day, when he asked them who was expecting. (The word pregnant was considered vulgar. Can you imagine?) I've never taken German but somehow when I hear it spoken, part of me feels that I understand what is said. Maybe it's a memory or a sound that embeds itself in the genetic coding of our family. For many years, as a younger adult, I believed I shared very little with my family. Now that I'm older, I can clearly see we aren't really so different after all.
When I was younger every new face I saw looked new. Now, even the new faces looked hauntingly familiar. Often, at night, before I drop off into sleep, beneath my closed eye lids, I see a kaleidoscope of faces. Each face fades and transforms into the next. I don't know the people behind the faces. They are strangers to me. Yet, in each strangers face, I see the familiar. I see a part of myself. They are composites of everyone I have ever met. My world is smaller than it was.
The world once seemed so vast, so strange, so big. As I child I always wanted to find out what lie beyond the hills above our farm. I secretly promised myself that I would travel beyond the mountains someday and see what was on the other side. I spent hours daydreaming about what might life might be like once I left the farm, this small town, my family. When I dropped out of my freshman year of college, I stopped dreaming. A job at Ditter's Store helped me dream again.
Ditter's was a general grocery store. Alongside the vegetables, bread, meats and candy, were gallons of paint, toys, overalls, stove pipe and a whole lot of general things a person might need. In the basement, sat a still, well used during the years of prohibition. No longer in service, it was a trophy of wilder, less law abiding days. Questions about it didn't bring many answers but always a wry smile.
I was hired to clerk, stock shelves, take inventory, make sausage, clean the milk cases. In a small general store, there are plenty of opportunities to do it all. The Ditter girls, a trio of spinster ladies who grew up running the store with their family, were getting older. They needed someone young. The current owners wife and the Ditter girls knew me since I was born. They knew that I always knew how to count out my money for the correct amount. They knew I was honest and didn't shoplift. They knew that I sponsored my candy habit with an energetic pop bottle refund endeavor. One day, I was offered a job. They knew I was home and needed one. I took it.
I liked my new job, well most of it. I did a lot of complaining about how heavy the beer cases and pop cases were. Learning to use a hand truck saw the destruction of more than one case of beer. A case was full of glass bottles then. When I failed to use the hand truck properly and a case of beer hit the floor of the walk-in cooler, well, you can only image the ankle deep foam that flowed ever so freely. My employer would shake her head and break out the mop. In time, I learned how to use the hand truck with a great deal of proficiency, all 110 lbs. of me. Good thing too or I'd have had to start paying for what I was splashing on the cooler floor. I needed all I could earn. I began college transfer courses at a nearby community college. I wanted that 4-year degree. I loved school and my classes. I was enjoying my independence, my youth. Life was good.
In time, I bought a small car, a Toyota Carina. There weren't many non-American made vehicles in my neck of the woods and I took a lot of teasing about my "rice grinder." The political incorrectness of that title would made modern souls shudder. Under the hood of my faithful little car, there were actual Japanese characters on some of the parts of the car. I learn to change my own oil and the air filters. I also learned to charm the mechanic in the gas station across the street. A handsome man named, Don often did simple repairs for me at a very reasonable rate. I was learning to flirt. At first, I was still too young to realize it and to understand what power I might be wielding. This was a very new thing to someone who had been a nerdy, date-less, four-eyed wonder. I liked positive male attention. I enjoyed the company of men.
Within a year, I would be horrified at my flirty ways and feel responsible for the demise of a marriage. I fell in love with a married man, a manager at the store. His wife and I were friends. He would often invite me to sleep with him. I was young and naive. I couldn't believe he was serious. I was not the type of young lady to ever want to be the "other woman" no matter how hard I had fallen for him. When a new hire, was the right kind of girl to accept an indecent proposal, he led people to believe it was me he was seeing. I was mortified. Worse yet, I felt responsible. I hadn't done anything except love someone I couldn't have. The guilt was crushing. Running from the problem, I got a job in the business office of an x-ray clinic in a town 15 miles away. Inside, I wore a scarlet letter of shame. What had I done?
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