Mini-Mart Moment
On my walk home from REI on Christmas Eve, I stopped off at a carryout on Eastlake to buy a bottle of water. As I walked up to the counter, there was a young man ahead of me engaged with the cashier, apparently playing some kind of instant lotto game.
The clerk looked up at him and shook her head, indicating that his try had failed. “No?”, he asked, seeming genuinely surprised, and some anxiety filled his face. He asked for another chance, and the clerk said he didn’t have enough money left on the debit card he was using.
“Take off the gum, then, ” he said, indicating a pack of Eclipse he had intended to buy. The clerk shook her head and said there still wasn’t enough for another play. The guy’s anxiety multiplied. “Is there a pay phone outside? I need to call someone about the balance on this card.”
He ran outside, and I felt suddenly self-conscious about paying a buck and a half for water, but the long walk had made me dry enough to think it was an exceptional bargain.
As I left the store to continue my walk home, the guy was talking animatedly on the pay phone. It struck me that the cost of the call, added to his foregone chewing gum, should have been enough for his next play. I wondered what was so urgently driving him to be desperately playing convenience-store lotto at 5pm on Christmas Eve, and as a parent of a child his age, I felt a twinge or two in my gut. Was it a need for the proceeds, for drink or meth or a hail-Mary Christmas gift for a girl friend or child? Or just the reflexive twitch of a gambling habit crashing against the rocky beach of another overdraft?
I adjusted my backpack full of my own desperate Christmas Eve enterprise and walked on, conscious of my wallet flush with crisp new cash machine $20s, wondering if I’d missed a chance for a holiday gesture by not popping him a buck for one more play, whether the extra 10 seconds of hope would have made any difference.
