My mother is a deal hunter. She doesn’t really need to save a dollar, but she’ll scour city papers for deals and then drag me along to find cheap gallons of Gatorade or dozens of socks. This weekend the treasure hunter and I went to a grocery store in Bell in search of a $5.99 case of Coca-Cola.
Despite our professional-shopper knowledge of where deals are normally found in grocery stores, it took us half an hour to find the cases of soda (they were hidden in a remote back corner, while signs pointing to the more expensive boxes of 12 cans was ubiquitous). My mom got it into her head that the store was trying to pull some kind of consumer fraud thing on her, so she decided to buy a lot of the cases of soda, as if that would teach the store’s owners a lesson. That, and she is naturally inclined to prepare for natural disasters by buying soda.
Upon arriving at the checkstand, we found a a tiny 60-something looking woman standing ready to bag our groceries. She reminded me of my Abuelita Nena because she was only about five feet tall and her face was shriveled around her eyeglasses.
As our cases of Coca-Cola were rung up, this little, stand-in Mexican grandmother, picked up each of our cases and tossed them one by one into the shopping cart. It was like watching a hammer throw on the World’s Strongest Man competition.
The cases would fly two feet through the air and land in the cart. A loud crash would be heard and I would get annoyed because the impact was making the cart jump inches off the ground and a crowd was beginning to gather.
And that’s when the bagger discovered the miracle of the Christmas Coca-Colas. On what seemed to be her last attempt to win the gold medal in Coca-Cola case tossing, the bagger put more air under the case and as it crashed into the cart, the box broke open and all of the cans came tumbling into the shopping cart.
The bagger tried to put the cans back into the box, and then found that all but one fit. “Sobra uno” she announced, wide-eyed and staring intently at the extra can.
I gave her a look that said this was impossible and she was crazy for implying otherwise. Increasingly annoyed, I told her to try the repacking again, and again she had an extra can. She held up the polar bear-decorated miracle can as if it was a precious commodity. ”Todavía sobra,” she smiled.
I had watched her pack the cans and knew she had no more room in the box. In the holiday spirit, for a split second, I too started to believe this grocery store was one of those mysterious miracle spots in the universe written about in great literature and put on television by the WB in “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
I looked at my grandmother’s Santa-hat-clad stand-in and wanted to believe this story in the way I believed many of those my Abuelita Nena once told me.
Then a long-haired, 18-year-old bagging supervisor walked in and took over. He repacked the cans, and they all fit nicely into the box. The elderly bagger and I looked at one another.
She shook her head, stared at her feet, and dejectedly said, “Oh, I guess I just didn’t know how to pack them.” It made me sad to see my grandmother’s sadness in this woman’s face, so I smiled at her and said, “Es Navidad, nunca se sabe cuando va suceder un milagro.”
She perked up a little at the thought of a holiday miracle, “Es cierto, el milagro de las Coca-Colas.”
© Laura Genao 2006
Pinche Laura, you should sell bibles!