Chris,
I am always impressed with your ability to recall your interactions with patrons. Yesterday, while at the counter waiting for the card reader to light up, T_____ points out the hand sanitizer and I squirt some on my palm.
"You can't use enough hand sanitizer," I say, acknowledging if not promoting its curve-flattening contribution to the current pandemic.
T____ nods, smiles.
"What if you have eczema?" quivers a voice behind me.
I turn to see a young man, his wounded eyes brimming with passive-aggression.
"The alcohol in hand sanitizer is bad for eczema," he says, his chin rising slightly, confirming the latter part of my amateur diagnosis.
Rather than tell him there are non-alcohol hand sanitizers that use fulvic acid, something I assume from his comportment that he is already aware of, and rather than qualify my comment as figurative rather than literal, I play his game, make it personal. "But I don't have eczema."
"Then you should have said, 'I can't use enough hand sanitizer,'" he says.
"No," I tell him unconditionally, "I'm going to stick with the second person, because without it I would not have experienced what is becoming an increasingly unpleasant conversation," after which this masochist (me) left the store having learned why those who work in bookstores play it close to the chest, why declarations like mine are like rabbits thrown to mastiffs.
Good god, Chris! -- how do you do it! (I say this knowing that the problem lies just as much with grumps like me.)
M
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