Black Friday

Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving.

I’d decided to camp in the Walmart parking lot the night before. With Walmart closed, the lot would be empty and quiet. It was, and I slept comfortably. I thought about all the work I’d done the day prior, school work and personal paperwork, and felt satisfied. There was still something I needed to do, but I couldn’t remember what. In the middle of the night, I remembered: I had to print out that form from the insurance company and mail it to the hospital.

I’m in the Walmart lot. It’s Black Friday. I wonder if they have any deals on printers.

I got up to go get my phone.

Unplugging it from the solar panel jack, I clicked the phone on, revealing the time.

2:03.

I brought it back to bed and searched for Walmart.com and began looking at Black Friday deals and found a printer, a Canon, for under twenty bucks.

Should I just get up now? The lines will probably be long as the New Mexico state governor only allows 75 shoppers in the store at any one time. Eh. I don’t want to stand in the cold and miss out on sleep for a printer. What’s the matter with just doing like you’ve been doing? Go to the library and print your documents.

In the end, I went to sleep. If I woke up early and the lines didn’t seem too bad, I’d go get one and hope they hadn’t already sold out.

I slept solidly for a few more hours, waking at 5:26.

Bounding out of bed, I pulled back the curtain and looked toward Walmart. Only a few people in line. Maybe the store opened at six. I put Buena outside while I raced to get dressed and make tea. If I had to stand in line in the cold, I wanted a warm beverage in my hands.

Bringing Buena back inside, I gave her a treat just like I did every morning. Then, I hastily filled her bowl with food. “I’ll be back, bebe,” I said, grabbing my keys and bounding out the door.

I walked across the lot to the lighted doors, where no one stood in line. Two Walmart employees stood like the scorpion guards to the netherworld, and I approached like another Gilgamesh, anxious to pass through. “Are you guys open?”

“Yes,” the older man said, “but we’re at capacity right now. You’ll have to wait until someone else comes out.”

I stood next to the doors, noticing a shopper coming out from the other door. “Somebody just came out. Can I go in now?” I asked impatiently.

“Each door is separate,” the man sighed. “You have to wait until someone comes out this door.”

I looked into the store, and a slow-moving heavy woman with her jacket pulled over her head and a blue medical facemask made her way to the door. “She’s coming out, so can I go in now?” I asked feeling like an impatient child.

Are we there yet?

The man looked inside. “No, that’s just a store employee.”

“Okay,” I said, somewhat disappointed, but looking past the woman at the self-checkout registers where another customer paid for his goods.

The woman came out and said something to the man.

“You can go in now,” the man looked at me.

“Oh! Thank you!” I said, dashing into the store and heading straight to electronics where about thirty $19 Canon printers were stacked.

Success!

* * *

Walking back across the lighted nearly-empty Walmart lot, I thought back to another Black Friday from before the world went digital and a person didn’t think to document and record every nuance of life. It must have been the late 1990s or early 2000s, and we went to the Galleria shopping mall in St. Louis to watch the annual free production of The Nutcracker. I loved that ballet, and my children were taking dance classes, so it became a yearly tradition.

That year, after the show, I suggested we head over to Macy’s since it was right there. I wanted to see if they had any women’s sweaters on sale. The escalators were at the middle of the store in an open-air configuration so as to see all the way up to the third floor. As we let the moving stairs pull us upward to the second floor, I noticed that a large person lay on the second floor about 20 feet from the escalators. A small group of people huddled around, trying to revive that person.

While still riding up on the escalator, one of the people started chest compressions.

CPR.

“This is serious,” I said to Larry and the girls.

Losing all interest in sweaters, we stood a distance away and watched and prayed.

In what felt like only a small matter of minutes, two EMTs brought a stretcher up the same elevator we’d just taken. They began doing medical stuff and taking over the chest compressions from the bystander.

I stood there transfixed.

This person, a woman, lay on the Macy’s floor battling for her life. I wondered whether she had a big meal the day before with family and friends. I wondered if she got up early, looking forward to bargain shopping on Black Friday. I imagined the faded black of lost consciousness and wondered whether she was at all cognizant of what was happening, perhaps looking out of that long hollow tube toward the light and seeing unfamiliar faces and sounds.

“Come on, let’s go,” Larry grumbled. “We don’t need to see this.”

Years later, in my second year of teaching, one of my writing students told the story about how her friend died at the Galleria Macy’s store.

“Was it the day after Thanksgiving?” I asked.

The student looked at me for a long moment and with hesitation said, “Yes.”

“I saw it,” I said, still feeling a deep connection to that situation, though I really didn’t know either the student or the deceased. But, somehow, I felt connected.

In the tapestry of this human experience spanning the millennia, each of us are a thread. Sometimes our lives run beside others in a single line of repetitive color. Other times, our lives may weave in and out, crossing paths with others at seemingly random intervals, forming patterns in the tapestry. And, at some point, each string will be cut from the cloth. It is the way of things.

A Black Friday doesn’t pass without me thinking about that woman on the floor at Macy’s or that student whose name I can’t remember now. But in many ways, I feel some deep point of connection...like we are three threads of some grand tapestry.