(Before I go on, I must clarify that because Blaine is such a small town...so small we don't have a stoplight...so small our library is smaller than my house...so small that we only have two bums who take turns sitting by the train tracks...I consider all the people of Blaine to be roommates of mine. And damn, we're all pretty miserable.)
Yesterday, I went to Cost Cutter to get some donuts. (Cost Cutter is the only grocery store in Blaine, unless you want to drive all the way down Peace Portal Drive to Birch Bay to visit The Market.) But let me tell you, those bakers at Cost Cutter make one hell of a cinnamon and sugar cake donut. I wish I would have bought more, actually, because I'm thinking about those donuts right now, and wishing I had another two or three to eat, but I only bought two yesterday. I also found some discounted yogurt, but that's beside the point. Actually, all this talk about donuts is beside the point as well. The point is, as I was leaving Cost Cutter, I witnessed something truly miserable.
The giant automatic sliding glass doors had shirked all grocery-store-door-loyalties and decided to close, rather than open, when someone walked across their threshold. A woman, who, miserably enough, didn't even Buy anything at Cost Cutter -- she must have come in, and not found what she needed, or decided that ice-cream was too expensive for a Tuesday, or realized she didn't have her wallet or something -- was trapped between the giant automatic sliding glass doors. They were squeezing in harder and harder, pressing her shoulder blades together and threatening to mess up her weekly short-hair perm. She had both hands pressed out, trying to fight against these truly awful doors, but to no avail. The hindu man behind her abandoned his cart full of milk (I'm sorry, I'm not trying to offend, this is an accurate, though unfortunately stereotypical description) to try to help her. He banged on the right door, and then on the left, and eventually jerked the doors apart. The three of us didn't say a word, we just looked at one another and chuckled, our eyes wide with a sick sort of glee.
The three of us loved that angry door for smashing that poor woman -- herself included -- because at least it was something out of the ordinary. Our usual misery comes from sitting at train tracks for five to twenty minutes waiting for cargo cars to crawl by as they go past inspection at the border. But yesterday was different. Yesterday was miraculously miserable.
As I drove away from Cost Cutter, excitedly reliving the angry door incident, I looked back at those giant glass doors, and watched a man cross the threshold. The doors slammed shut and he stuck his palms out, trying to stop them in their tracks. He pried himself free and looked back at the doors, motioning his hands as if to say: "Who can believe this?!" The doors continued to open, and then close, on every person who walked through them.
We all secretly loved it. We're all too miserable not to.
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