Hamming It Up

Scene: The deli counter at Wegmans, amidst a crowd of ravenous shoppers, Sunday night. Hautboys.

I take my little numbered slip out of the dispenser. It reads "05." My number gets called.

A quarter pound of Wunderbar bologna, please.

The clerk, an elderly woman, maybe in her sixties, with short hair and almost manly features, soon hands me a plastic bag with the contents as ordered.

Anything else? she asks.

Sure, ham-off-the-bone, a third of a pound.

[We interrupt this program to declare: "Ham-off-the-bone" is not a term I will touch with a 10-foot Pole, or a 6-foot Swede. HAAHAHAHAHAHAHA.]

Honeyed? she inquires.

Um, I don't know. No. Regular (even though I don't even know what "regular" is).

A fellow employee walks up to the clerk, asking her to take something; it looks like lemon chicken; he asks her to weigh it and put a price sticker on it.

Do you mind if I do this?

No, I say, quarter truthfully but not expecting any significant delay.

The clerk goes to the opposite end. She is weighing, wrapping, weighing, wrapping, putting containers on the scale to get the tare weight. She is nodding upward to read through her bifocals. This is taking a long time. Numbers 07, 08, 09, and 10 are being called. I start to feel like an idiot and begin to fume. I begin to loathe my personally appointed sales associate serving Mr. Pawlie fecking Kokonuts himself. I consider just walking off. Screw it. Maybe come back later with, say, a lovely new number, maybe 24, Willie Mays's number.

I hold off.

She comes back to be.

Thank you so much for waiting, she says with touching earnestness.

That's all right, I lie, starting to feel like an impatient fool, but grateful I did not storm off.

Many people wouldn't be that patient. I really appreciate it, she declares.

That's okay, I say.

What did you want? she asks, almost maternally

A third of a pound of ham.

It looks as if she's a few slices off. In my impatience, I'm waving her off, as if to say, Don't bother, don't worry about it, I wanted a little more than a third of a pound anyway. But, aha! I begin to realize she is throwing those extra slices in there after everything was weighed as a gift, as a thank you for my perceived "patience."

I thank her, and continue shopping, making a note to blog about this when I get around to blogging again.

Internally, I was not at all patient.

Externally, to her, I was a paragon of patience.

Does it still count?

(It used to be a mortal sin in my conscience, even if I thought the impure thought.)

Incidentally, my knowledge of Latin from back in high school, from my seminary days, tells me patience comes from the Latin word meaning "to suffer," "to endure."

I guess impatience can be a sort of albatross.

Incidentally once again, The Online Etymology Dictionary is a great resource. I recommend it; the site offers opportunities to sponsor words, teasing readers to send someone lust.

Intriguing.

(Disclaimer: No actual meat was consumed in the typing of this post.)