And life's lessons. Excerpts from "Next Year Stay Home, America" by Ms. Noonan, WSJ, Nov. 30. A time in her life when she worked as a waitress: People will tell you their life stories over coffee. There's something personal, even intimate, in serving people food, and regulars would come in at 6 or 7 a.m. and in time you'd find you were appointments in each other lives. Including long haul truckers who hadn't talked to anyone in hours.
I learned from them what a TSA agent told me many years later; "Everyone's carrying the same things." I had asked the agent what she'd learned about people from years of opening people's bags and seeing what was inside. She meant her answer literally: Everybody's carrying the same change of clothes, the same toiletries. But at the moment she said it we both understood that she was speaking metaphorically too: Everyone's carrying the same burdens, the same woes one way or another. We have more in common than we know. (Or ever will know. Some are just more publicized, my comment)
Quoting Ms. Noonan again: "People deserve a day off if what they do is nonessential. Selling a toy, a jacket, etc. is nonessential.
Black Friday--that creepy sales bacchanal in which the lost, the lonely, the stupid and the compulsive line up before midnite Friday (or sooner) to crash through the doors, trampling children and frightening clerks (or worse) along the way--is bad enough, enough of a blight on the holiday."
Interesting and true.
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