Dark Energy

I was down in Palo Alto yesterday, passing President’s Day by hanging out with Guy and Megan. She was busy frosting a cake. He was working on preparing the smoked hamburgers. That left only me to run to the store to pick up some items we forgot on our earlier trip. Thankfully Whole Foods is just a few blocks away.

While standing there in the bread section, searching in vain for sourdough hamburger buns, I noticed a blind woman having a rough go of navigating between the display table and the racks of breads. She was older and obviously wasn’t going to be able to swing a trip through the store on her own.

“Pardon me, ma’am. Can I help you find something?”

“Oh, isn’t that nice of you. Yes, you could. There’s no one at the customer service desk to help me and I need to get to the dairy case.”

“No problem. I’m new to this store myself but I think we can find it. Here’s my arm.”

From dairy case (“8 oz. yogurt, any fruit flavor is fine” and “soy cheese, any flavor”) to bulk foods (“a third of a pound of nutritional yeast, no more and no less”) to the checkout lane I led her around the store. We were in transit somewhere in produce when she told me I shouldn’t worry about her. In four months she would be healed, you see. Right after the law suit. She was going to fly to Orlando with a doctor friend of hers from Menlo Park and they were going to confront the person who had used dark energy on her spirit to make her blind. There was precedent for this sort of thing and they were going to take legal action get this person to give her back her sight. So never I worry, she was going to be just fine.

We reached the checkout lane where she thanked me for all my help and told me she’d be fine on her own from there. I told her to have a good night and then beat a hasty retreat back to the bread section. I still hadn’t located any appropriate hamburger buns and, really, I didn’t want to be hanging around when the dark energy struck again.