THAT'S MY LINE

You can find something beautiful every day and, if you stop looking so often, the beautiful may actually find you. It found me Saturday afternoon. At discounter Marshall’s in West Palm Beach. On a line. A really long line that stretched around the store and lasted for one hour and forty-five minutes. No pot of gold at the end of that marathon, no Bruce Springsteen tickets, no extra discount. Nothing but the hundred dollars of fungible household goods we had come for and could presumably have obtained with less difficulty a few days later.

Of course, I surveyed the line at the outset and looked over at my wife. We’re out of here, right?

I have never liked a long line. Who would? Known as queue in England or file on the way in or out of the middle school assembly, it is the quintessential time waster. The longtime symbol of government inefficiency ala every town’s motor vehicle department. The endless wait for 1930s soup and the bank run reminders of what happens when an economy crashes to earth. The virtual wait on hold to get something done via the telephone almost as old as the device itself.

I have passed by many lines in my time, be they lines of sadness at the unemployment office or lines of anticipation and joy outside Madison Square Garden or lines of false pride at Studio 54. I have always passed them by, with sympathy, with derision, with gratitude for not being on them.

That all changed Saturday. At Marshalls, the off-price family apparel and home fashion retailer that’s been around since 1956 and is now (along with sister companies Home Goods and T.J. Maxx) a part of the The TJX Companies, Inc. public company empire valued at 140 billion dollars. Millions of shares of TJX trade every day of the week as traders wonder just how many pairs of Calvin Klein underwear and Christmas tree ornaments its thousands of stores will be able to push out the door in the months to come. Like its competitors, it will seek to reward its chief executive officer with 15 million dollars a year, give or take, for leading that charge and will keep its shareholders interested with 1 or 2 percent annual dividend payments and returns on investment of 20 percent more annually. It will pay its employees so little with ever disappearing medical benefits, job security and retirement contributions that will make it forever difficult to retain good people. And maybe, just maybe, that is why only 3 cash registers of the 13 at the store I visited Saturday had employees on duty the entire time I was there. When we finally arrived at the promised land, I turned around and took note that the line was as long as it had been when we embarked on our checkout mission so long ago. I believe they call that a business model.

The model’s no longer working, is it? No matter how much George W. Bush and our leaders who followed hope that people will keep spending more than they can possibly afford to. Marshalls and its fellow entities depend on the government to keep the roads to the store maintained. They depend on the government to train soldiers and police to keep the free enterprise machine greased and oiled, to make the world, especially the mall parking lots, safe and secure. They depend on the government to educate their workers and customers, to keep them reasonably healthy and secure in youth and retirement. And they depend on the government to backstop the banks and other lenders so the money keeps flowing. Just don’t ask them where this government money should come from because I believe the next four years may provide some regrettable answers.

This was to be an essay about finding beauty, wasn’t it? Time I got around to that part of the story. The beauty was that line, a few hundred individuals of every race, religion and presumably political bent sharing a random Saturday afternoon. No politics, no religion, no cutting in line, no screaming, no ranting, no vocal complaints whatsoever. Laughing, smiling folks from seven to seventy, shuffling in place, looking at their phones, talking to their family members and to the total strangers around them. It just might be a Florida thing, being bored with the 75 degrees, no humidity and cloudless sky just outside the store doors, and willing to wait so patiently. It might be resignation, it might be a lot of things. What it was for me was beautiful, so much so that when my wife reasonably suggested 20 minutes in that we might put our goods on hold and come back later that night, I was adamant about staying.

Where else would I meet a wonderful young Canadian mother, working so hard to make it in Florida, so many years into the green card process of lawyers and necessary business purchases, wondering if she might have to go home or to Europe after all this effort to make America her home? Did I know that Canada has 1/9 the population of the US but has only slightly less lawful permanent residents, approximately 8 million versus 13 million? No, I did not. And that the system, if you try to do it legally like my newfound friend, can sometimes take 20 years or more? I had heard that part. We should have secure borders, definitely. But maybe be a little more generous in the numbers and far more expedited in the legal immigration part of the equation and I’m sure we’ll achieve another way to cut down on the illegal part. I do know that my new friend would be a credit to this country and has been struggling for years to try to make that happen.

Then there was my new Brooklyn transplant friend and her brilliant and vivacious preteen daughter who never once whined or complained about being there. We talked about restaurants and how they couldn’t take their elderly Italian patriarch out to an American Italian restaurant because it never measured up and he wasn’t shy about saying so aloud. I told her an introduction to my wife’s Italian mother who was always the same way might be a great idea. And somehow, when the subject of college came up, my new friend expressed near tears of joy upon recognizing my wife as the best and most inspirational professor of her life, no surprise to me.

Something about that line and that feeling of afternoon haplessness opened everyone up, to conversation, to camaraderie, to connections, to genuine affection. Don’t ask me how it happened, it just did, so much so that our little group discussed a reunion every year at Marshalls and I’m thinking that might just happen.

We are all in a hurry in this country because that’s what we do best and are always encouraged to do. Hustle, earn, stress, and repeat. Some of my fondest memories came during an epic 1978 snowstorm when everything shut down in Boston for a week. Other nations have siestas, sabbaticals, shorter work weeks. And now, in my mind, we have the possibility of the line. I’ll keep my eyes out and my mind open for the next one.