i'm a goodie, and kind of an oldie

Whenever I am out by myself, without children or even my old man, who knows me too well, I feel young. I feel exactly the way I felt when I was seventeen. I am completely unaware of any distance traversed to get from my current self to my remembered self, and I can pretend that we are the same only smarter, more competent, less concerned with boys. These are good times, whether wandering around a museum or cruising the aisles of the grocery store.

I was at Whole Foods the other night, which I still call Fresh Fields, which I've also heard referred to as Whole Paycheck, which is right on the money, when I had one of those bizarre self-realizations that can only happen while standing alone in the check-out aisle of the grocery store at night. The guy helping me bag my groceries was very friendly, kind of chatty in an easy-going way, probably because it was almost closing time. I remember that feeling from my days at Baskin-Robbins. Depending on how the rest of the shift had gone, the last customer was either my newest best bud who got a little more than that 4.2 ounces or the walking nightmare who got some bad juju with his double banana-split.

I asked bagger guy if he'd had a good night, and he told me he'd entertained himself by singing along with the oldies that played over the loud speakers.

"Oh yeah," I said, remembering my duet with Cher on Gypsies, Tramps and Thieves in the frozen foods aisle.

"Yeah," he said "There's this one oldie... I don't know who sings it... It goes "If you're lost, you can look and you will find me...""

"What?!" I practically yelled. Who was this person who considered Cyndi Lauper's Time After Time an oldie? "How old are you? That's not an oldie, that's from the eighties."

"Oh yeah," he said, backing away somewhat. "I love the eighties." He said it in this way, this outsider's way of being fascinated with something of which they know absolutely nothing, that brought me right back to my current self. I was suddenly acutely aware of how much had passed between then and now.

"You need some help getting this to your car?" he asked.

"No, thanks," I said. "I got it."