Junior

(Photo by Chuck Wainwright.)

Yesterday (Wednesday, November 24, 2010), the day before Thanksgiving, after working out in the Canandaigua YMCA Exercise-Gym, I patronized the mighty Canandaigua Weggers to do our weekly grocery shopping.
I don’t do everything there — my wife gets quite a bit from another supermarket.
But there are a few things we only get at Wegmans, e,g. milk and produce.
Milk is usually cheaper there — Shoppers Club. And their produce is usually better.
But not always. Yesterday’s bananas were stridently green.
It was horrible.
Mano-a-mano with the bumper-cart ladies in search of Thanksgiving fixin’s.
I wondered if the Pilgrims could handle it.
“HEX-KYOOZE-me; I was just trying to get through.”
I knocked over a display of large candles in Ball jars.
Or rather, I was shoved into it.
Every aisle intersection was a right-of-way issue; “You first.” “No, you first.”
Except it wasn’t the right-of-way allowed in traffic law.
Right-of-way seemed to be a function of the heft of the cart-driver, and the size of her cart.
“Me first. You and that wussy cart can wait.”
“I’m not moving. I have to look at this spice rack. You can just wait, little man.”
Comely teenyboppers, who obviously hadn’t been in Wegmans in years — it’s not the mall — were angrily texting their friends via cellphone, accompanying Mom in her hunt for provisions.
“Lessee, we still need yams, and cranberries, and stuffing-mix.”
“Mom, can’t we just go to McDonald’s and get a turkey-melt?”
“Beep-boop-beep-boop!”
“She wants stuffing-mix. What a loser!” FLIP!
On the way in I noticed the 55+ magazine outside in the free magazines rack.
A smiling silver-haired dude was on the cover.
On the way back out, I happened to notice it again.
“A Publisher’s New Life,” it blared.
“Wait a minute,” I thought. “That looked like George Jr., my old boss.”
For almost 10 years (1996-2005), after my stroke in 1993, I worked at the Canandaigua Daily-Messenger newspaper. It was the best job I ever had.
When I started the head-honcho was George Ewing Sr. (“you-ing”), the newspaper’s publisher.
Sr. had purchased the Messenger in 1959; when I was in ninth grade.
Sr. eventually retired before me, and handed over management of the newspaper to his son, George Jr., who was already its owner.
Sr. died a couple years ago.
Jr. was head-honcho toward the end of my employ.
His office-door was always open, and we got along quite well.
“People complain about this place,” I once told him; “but not me. I previously worked at Transit, and that place was a zoo.
Compared to Transit, this newspaper is Heaven.”
Jr. had to sell the Messenger not long after I retired.
It needed modernization, and no one in the Ewing family was interested.
Jr. is now 58; I helped him celebrate when he turned 50.
He wanted to go back to teaching, which I guess is what he did before the Messenger.
But age works against him.
So he decided to go back to college to complete his Masters Degree.
Jr. is one of the neatest people I ever met.

• I work out in the Canandaigua YMCA exercise-gym. (“Canandaigua” [“cannan-DAY-gwuh”] is a small city to the east nearby where we live in Western NY. The city is also within a rural town called “Canandaigua.” The name is Indian, and means “Chosen Spot.” It’s about 15 miles away. —We live in the small rural town of West Bloomfield in Western NY, southeast of Rochester.)
• “Mighty Weggers” is Wegmans, a large supermarket-chain based in Rochester we often buy groceries at. They have a store in Canandaigua.
• “Transit” equals Regional Transit Service, the public transit-bus operator in Rochester, NY, where I drove transit-bus for 16&1/2 years (1977-1993). My stroke October 26, 1993 ended that.