The mystic key, part 1
A short story of mystical realism
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Emmet steered his vehicle into the space next to the cart return, an old habit to trim a minute off each stop, that minute between transferring the bags of groceries into his hatchback and stowing the cart. Parking spaces near the storefront were never a certainty, but ones within a space or two of a return—those were usually open. And, as he’s done since long ago when his mother and he made five stops after school on Thursday afternoons, he could ride the cart down the pavement like a scooter, aided by the invariable pavement grade that protected the supermarket from flooding. A quick coast down from the exit, unload, stash the cart, and all was done. Perhaps it was undignified for a man in mid-life to cruise upon such a rattly metal contraption, but he was no more ashamed of his joyrides now than he was on those mid-week afternoons of his youth.
His being here, he reflected for perhaps the hundred and eighty-seventh time since he took on his family’s weekly errands nearly four years ago, continued that same pattern. Mother taught him well, expressing her satisfaction wherever he related his upholding of her price-scouting traditions. In her time—and his, for that matter—it began on Wednesdays. They stopped at a dumpy convenience store on their way home from school and Emmet ran in with a buck thirty-five exactly: fifteen cents for the newspaper and $1.20 for the gallon of milk that came in two plastic bags—not bottles, not cartons…bags. Bags that slipped into a Tupperware holster created for that singular purpose. On principle, Mother and Dad never shopped convenience stores because convenience meant higher markups. But this one store for one product was the exception: it had the cheapest milk around. Maybe that was because the milk came in bags.
On Wednesday evenings, Mother scoured the supermarket circulars from the paper—the whole reason for the fifteen-cent expenditure (though Emmet made sure to extract the comics). She clipped all the necessary coupons, matched them up with manufacturer coupons, and noted those excellent sales with which she would stock her large walk-in pantry of floor-to-ceiling shelves, her two upright freezers, and various caches that Dad had attached to the exposed ceiling joists in the mudroom at the back of the house—a space aptly named for what Dad routinely tracked in from his weekend projects. And if it wasn’t mud it was engine oil or dozer grease, the vivid stenches of which Emmet could still recall at will. Mother kept a ghastly old plastic tablecloth atop the refrigerator to cover his chair at lunchtime.
The Wednesday-night ritual concluded with Mother distributing all those tactical and strategic purchases across her hit-lists for the various stores she’d patronize between school and home on Thursday when supplies were generally at their peak. Iin the cases when a sale item was already depleted, Mother was as religious about asking for rainchecks as she was about Holy Communion on Sundays at Amazing Grace Lutheran Church and School—a most familiar locale where she taught and Emmet learned every weekday and which not uncommonly saw the whole family on Saturdays for some other project. Mother claimed every special offer as her God-given right just as her own mother had done long ago as a newlywed during the Great Depression. Emmet chuckled. Though comparatively wealthy in their elder years, his parents still lived like they’d come through those years themselves, even though they hadn’t arrived on this planet until the wane of World War II and weren’t particularly deprived as children. Perhaps—he entertained this idea from times to time—they had, in their previous incarnations, lived through the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany. It would explain a few things.
Emmet chuckled at himself, too. He maintained ample backstock in his own home, due less to worries about the economy and more from the ongoing compulsion to take full advantage of those sales. Any neutral party would, if given the opportunity, wryly observe that his behavior reflected exactly that of the parents he once swore he would never imitate…a vow that lost its appeal once his own bank accounts were involved.
Emmet thought about how the forms had changed in recent years. The paper circulars and coupons were still there for the old-timers, true. Emmet, though, preferred PDFs and digital coupons in each store’s mobile app and was happy that the need to manage coupons for brand-name products had been largely alleviated by private-label goods whose quality far surpassed the monochromatically-labeled generics of yesteryear…a thought that invariably recalled, to Emmet’s mind, the clear image of Dad coming up the porch with a case of plain white cans, each identified in black Garamond Bold as simply BEER. And—thanks to computers and databases and data science and improved logistics with just-in-time delivery—modern-day stores were much more consistently stocked throughout the week. Emmet asked for a raincheck perhaps once every 10 months, if that, and, if the primitive, hand-written, carbon-copy registers that the cashiers still used in those cases were any indication, few people bothered with such scrupulosity these days. Certainly not often enough for anyone to bother modernizing the process.
So, the Thursday ceremonials hadn’t stuck. Emmet ran his errands mainly on Saturdays, as early as possible to avoid the crowds, but not so early that the fresh bakery breads weren’t yet ready. COVID-19 lockdowns entrenched this particular schedule: by his reckoning, a focused pre-9am pass through even four or five stores brought him into close proximity with no more than twenty people, and even then, excepting the cashiers, for only a few seconds each. By his estimates, he didn’t spend more than a couple cumulative minutes within six feet of anyone, and what exposure he did get was filtered through decent KN-95 masks, which he preferred for their over-the-ear straps. The only drawback to the whole scene was trying to open those whispy produce bags without licking one’s fingers. Thank God for the water spray that supplied suitable moisture for that particular need.
Emmet had long dispensed with the masks, but early Saturdays remained. So, here he was, yet once more pulling into the spot next to the cart return.
Emmet stepped on the brake, jabbed the car’s starter button to kill the engine, gathered up his phone and his list, and let out a sigh. Of all the ways he might spend three hours on a weekend, including the driving time to and from his somewhat rural abode some distance out of town…. Not that it had to be Saturday, specifically—he could really come any morning of the week, as he usually got back home and unloaded all the provisions before the day’s other duties geared up. He’d done it plenty of times on Fridays before various online meetings and, more recently, before he and his wife got the day’s homeschooling going with their teenage son.
No, it wasn’t the day. Was it the ongoing grind of weekly provisioning to meet the incessant demands of the body? Emmet briefly indulged in a favorite recurring fantasy of overcoming the need to eat at all, to live off air and sunlight and cosmic energy like Teresa Neumann of Bavaria in the 1930s or like the elderly man from India he’d met some years earlier whose non-eating state had been medically verified. Maybe, Emmet hoped, it’d one day be true for him, too. He offered that exact prayer on occasion, especially during periods of personal retreat when he’d fast for a day or two, like the previous November when he gleefully acted the counter-culture rebel by undertaking a complete fast on Thanksgiving Day from food and football alike.
“Well,” Emmet reflected after this short reminisce, “that’s not my reality yet.” But, recalling the isolated peace and stillness of that recent seclusion, it occurred to him now that it wasn’t so much the food or the time or the day of the week that grated him but rather the nature of these errands and the environments in which they took place: essentially large, windowless boxes filled with a heterogeneity of nutrition and vice. Filled, too, with music that most people, he thought, if they even noticed it, probably had playing in the background of their lives already. Music that resonated with the very worldliness and self-absorption that seemed common amongst the motley assortment of characters that he encountered on these errands, not to mention the high-margin products designed and displayed to entice impulse purchases.
Would he go so far as to condemn such stores as spiritually deadening? No, not exactly. But they weren’t nearly as enlivening as the open skies of a long road trip, a bluebird day on the ski slopes, or a hike through forests and mountains. They don’t make national parks out of supermarkets for a reason, he reflected, any more than they do of the tire dealership a block to the north where he’d be waiting a week from Monday for his complimentary rotation and rebalancing.
There was something about standing among the giant trees in the Redwood or Sequoia National Parks, gazing across the vistas of the Rockies or the Great Smoky Mountains, and watching the reminders of Earth’s youth in Yellowstone or Hawaii that brought the presence of the Divine Friend into Emmet’s heart, as he so often felt during his silent retreats. He even considered those natural treasures as places of pilgrimage like other sacred sites that he’d visited around the world. Places of inspiration and upliftment. Places of wonder and even of deep-seated wisdom. Places where the Divine was so tangible—as joy, as expansive love, as ageless truth.
Places so unlike this temple of banal consumption that he would enter momentarily.
Emmet closed his eyes and recalled those feelings for which he so longed. Feelings that he hoped he’d soon have another opportunity to cultivate during another retreat, perhaps during the next school break. But for now…he let out another sigh.
Somewhere in his perception he heard a small rumble, like someone clearing his or her throat. It was followed by a voice reverberating within his awareness—a perception more than a sound, a voice distinct from the timbre of his own thoughts, and especially a voice with a kind of stern yet loving challenge to his preconceptions and, if he were to give it a specific descriptor, his apparent lack of adventuresomeness. It was the voice he’d occasionally cognized on other occasions—in the silence of contemplative prayer, in the glory of a sunset, in the surge of vital power emanating from a place whereupon a true saint had left a vibratory signature. A voice that now, as then, addressed him in the simplest, starkest, and perhaps most brutal terms.
Why not now, dear one? Why not here?
Emmet had no answer. It cut straight to the marrow of his narrow-mindedness and yet excised an inspiration. He opened his eyes, lifted himself out of the car, collected his aged reusable bags from the back seat, and tossed them upon the lower rack of a cart from the return next to him before heading to the entrance.
He barely made it off the pavement before his first opportunity presented itself.
(To be continued in part 2 next week)
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