Offended By Everything

Ashamed of Nothing

The woman has grey hair and glasses and sensible shoes and her car waves two American flags, one from each window. The car sits just outside the gas station where she can see it during her shifts. She can also see the sky and occasional ‘chemtrails’ which, she looks upward with disgust, they are poisoning us with, and I should look into it. “There are a lot of videos explaining it. I get horrible headaches.”

She smiles with each customer. After they leave, she will grace them with a compliment, “What a sweetie” or a judgement “They need a shower”. She lost her cell phone on a bus. She lives with her sons and one grandchild who she often cares for when not working. She worked on Christmas and had no plans to celebrate. “We just didn’t come up with anything,” and her eyes are sad and large behind her glasses as she says it. After she cleans the glass doors she is angry when a customer uses their palm to open the door, instead of the handle. She made up the change when I didn’t have enough cash. She calls me sweetie. She complains that customers walk into the store on their phones. She holds resentment against customers who use the restroom too frequently. She is visibly upset by fat people and as a fat person leaves the store she often seems to be searching the air in front of her for a reason to complain about the customer. Sometimes she fails and has an irritable tone during our transaction.

She looks forward to chatting with the local police who get a discount at her station. At one point she wanted to be a police officer. She admires discipline, rules, roles. “I watch those police shows all the time" she says, “and they have the hardest jobs in the world. We’ve gotten to soft. It’s all falling apart.” She is sober and in AA. For years she was falling apart. She needs more hours at the gas station but they aren’t available. She has a deeply lined face that often reminds me of the famous Dorothea Lange photo, if that same woman was photographed 20 years later. There will be no retirement. She smokes while pacing back and forth outside her station. “If they are law-abiding citizens then fine, but most of them aren’t, and that’s how life works. You have to put your family first, right, and we have to put our country first, and it’s sad, yeah, but they have to go. It’s not our fault how other countries treat their prisoners. We have our own problems.”