On A Late Night Trip To The Store

It's 3 am, but I'm still up grading papers and running numerical simulations. That's par for the course for a graduate student. In fact, I was in a math department computing lab in the TMCB until just a few minutes ago. Me and 4 other students. But then I started to think I might still want to get some sleep tonight, so I started home. During the drive, I was suddenly overcome with a tortilla chip craving (at this time, it's always either that or Lil' Debbie's cakes), so I pulled into Macey's buy a bag. I wasn't in the store long, but there was a nice sounding, albeit a little silly, song playing (I've learned its title is "True," by Ryan Cabrera). I grabbed a bag of chips, bought them at the self-checkout, and made my way out.

As I started to cross in the pedestrian crossing in front of the store entrance, an SUV drove towards me. I hesitated as they ignored the stop sign before slowing down in front of the store, and once I could see they were stopping, I continued across the street, a bit annoyed at the driver. The annoyance made me pay closer attention so that looking into the car I saw an older man, probably in his mid to late 60's with a white beard, in the passenger's seat. He was wearing a blue Macey's grocer apron with his name tag pinned on. He was obviously getting dropped off to go to work. I looked at the driver's seat to see the driver, almost certainly his wife. She was a little heavy but dressed fine, particularly for the time of night. What follows is my best guess at an interpretation, heavily influenced by the sentimental song I'd briefly listened to, and I could be completely off-base. But I think I'm mostly right. As I continued toward my car, I immediately felt bad that this older man had to go to work, probably every morning, at 2:30 or so. While it's possible he likes to work at that time, I find it more likely that, given he has to work at Macey's at all, his skill set does not admit very many job opportunities. That he is working at all at his age further suggests that he likely has did not have very many professional successes during life. I watched as he got out of the car and with a brace on his ankle, limped into the store while his wife pulled away. My initial impulse was that I wished I could give the couple a retirement fund so that they could choose not to work, if they wanted not to. Quickly, though, this feeling of pity gave way a totally different point of view. I saw a man who possibly had high expectations for himself when he was younger. Possibly he was talented. Possibly he gave his best effort to earn a living and through any of the myriad unhappy, unlucky circumstances that afflict men, he failed. My attention turned from him to his wife. Because I had no reason to assume otherwise, I saw a loyal, loving woman who supported her husband even after possibly years of defeat. Since it appeared he had difficulty getting around, she likely drives him every night, in the complete middle of the night, to his menial job. Maybe sometime long ago, she too had high hopes for her husband's potential career and the associated standard of living (I'm not conflating success and wealth. I know there are many successes that are independent of wealth. But to suggest that wealth and a certain standard of living are unimportant is naive at best).

I guess I saw myself what could easily be my future self walking into the store, beaten and tired, having failed to seize opportunities to succeed through my own fault or some misfortune. But the incredible thing that I saw, and this was the take home message for me, was this wife who just loved her husband and supported him and did whatever she could to help him, even if life was far from the ideal in terms of worldly comfort. I could so easily see that Natalie is such a wife, not only because at the moment we literally own almost nothing in the way of luxury and our car is tied together with string. But I could see that although we have high hopes for the job I'll have after school in a year, if things never really turn out and I have to work until I die to make ends meet, Natalie will just always stay with me and help me and I feel incredibly lucky to be married to a person like that. Because for me, failing professionally and being unable to provide a nice standard of living for Natalie would basically be one of the biggest failures I can imagine. But even if that happened, even if I failed in one of the worst ways I can imagine, I can see that Natalie would still love and support me. And it made me wonder: What does she most fear happening (or not happening) in the next 35 - 40 years? What things does most fear failing at? And how ccan I make sure that if that thing happened, if she failed in those ways, she would still know that I loved and supported her?