FOOTPRINT

It’s Sunday and we wake up to discover that we have no coffee in the house. We hop in a rented Chevrolet Cruze – my beloved 1998 Honda Civic is in the body shop for repair, the result of it being backed into by a delivery truck – and drive across town to Ralphs on Carrillo. The streets are quiet, a few people walking their dogs. The plaza in front of the public library is deserted, but in a few hours the homeless will begin congregating, some to sleep on the grass in the shade of a tree, others to hold court.

Inside Ralphs workers are restocking the shelves and arranging fruit and produce; others sweep the floors and rotate jugs of milk, containers of cottage cheese. I like this store because of its downtown location, and because here I see people I don’t see in Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods or Tri-County Produce – the elderly who live nearby, students, Mexican families, drifters and homeless. Each day a tide of human beings move through this store.

We locate our brand of coffee and a package of doughnuts for our son, and move through the self-service checkout, scanning our purchases and placing them in a reusable bag. No human interaction required, efficient yet impersonal; I swipe my debit card, enter my PIN, a receipt is automatically printed and the machine reminds me to take it.

Back outside I notice the grime on the red bricks and concrete, blobs of chewing gum, sticky stains from soda and juice spills, a single shoe imprint captured in this accumulated muck. NIKE, I think, though I could be wrong. This single imprint will last longer than a footprint on wet sand at the beach.