Tuesday, March 08, 2005
In Which I Actually Feel Good About Being "Old"
by Tom Bozzo
That sent me on a wild fennel chase that ended at Sentry Foods at Hilldale (nearly all the way back to work), which on my recent trips there has been a lesson in how stupid liquor laws are. Sentry employs a number of youthful grocery checkers — so youthful, in fact, that they can't ring up alcoholic beverage sales on their own authority. Late afternoon on Valentine's Day, when nearly everyone in line was a man with flowers in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, this kept the over-21 front-end managers very busy.
Today, I found myself behind a twentysomething dude buying one food item and a 12-pack of Leinie's Honey Weiss. The checkout dude looked to be 17 or 18. A manager was summoned to check out twentysomething's beer, and the manager miskeyed the year from the ID as 1972 instead of 1982. A brief exchange between checker and customer ensued to the effect of how glad twentysomething was to be 23 instead of 33. The checker expressed a wish to be able to reach 25, then cycle back to 21, etc.
If I were Oscar, I'd wish that I had mentioned "Logan's Run" at that point. Instead, I actually said that getting older was not so bad.
Checker said, "You're, what, 29?"
The slightest grin then crept across my face. I said, "I'm turning 37 in three weeks." Checker's head popped off.
"No way! Well, if I look as young as you when I'm 37, then I guess being old won't be so bad," he said.
Update 9:59 P.M.: I wrote the preceding before seeing this post of Jeremy's, which also mentions "Logan's Run." How weird is that?
Whole Foods let me down earlier this evening, as they didn't stock the fennel I needed to pick up for dinner, "Tomato and Fennel Stew with Big Shrimp."
That sent me on a wild fennel chase that ended at Sentry Foods at Hilldale (nearly all the way back to work), which on my recent trips there has been a lesson in how stupid liquor laws are. Sentry employs a number of youthful grocery checkers — so youthful, in fact, that they can't ring up alcoholic beverage sales on their own authority. Late afternoon on Valentine's Day, when nearly everyone in line was a man with flowers in one hand and a bottle of wine in the other, this kept the over-21 front-end managers very busy.
Today, I found myself behind a twentysomething dude buying one food item and a 12-pack of Leinie's Honey Weiss. The checkout dude looked to be 17 or 18. A manager was summoned to check out twentysomething's beer, and the manager miskeyed the year from the ID as 1972 instead of 1982. A brief exchange between checker and customer ensued to the effect of how glad twentysomething was to be 23 instead of 33. The checker expressed a wish to be able to reach 25, then cycle back to 21, etc.
If I were Oscar, I'd wish that I had mentioned "Logan's Run" at that point. Instead, I actually said that getting older was not so bad.
Checker said, "You're, what, 29?"
The slightest grin then crept across my face. I said, "I'm turning 37 in three weeks." Checker's head popped off.
"No way! Well, if I look as young as you when I'm 37, then I guess being old won't be so bad," he said.
Update 9:59 P.M.: I wrote the preceding before seeing this post of Jeremy's, which also mentions "Logan's Run." How weird is that?
