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went to the grocery store this afternoon. for some reason, maybe the time, maybe that i haven’t gone to this particular grocery store in a while, it was a more racially-diverse crowd than normal. (Buffalo is extremely segregated; I’m much more likely to see Indian/South Asian people than Black people, in my local neighborhood, but in the last five years or so the lines have been blurring. IDK what the stats are, but the most recent census was kind of startlingly clear-cut.)
apropos of not much, some tiny vignettes of people-watching:
a Black dad was pushing one of those carts with the two child seats and two steering wheels. One of his little boys was turning the wheel at random like little kids do, but the other one was steering like he actually knew how to steer a thing, quite competently, and I believe that child really thought he was genuinely steering the cart. (Later, we were behind them in line at checkout, and I think the boys were actually twins, or just very close in size. They had identical short-short haircuts and plaid button-down shirts.)
A pair of white people I absentmindedly thought were adults, a man and a woman, were standing next to a very full cart and behaving slightly strangely; I wasn’t paying attention but they were in the way of a thing I wanted to get to, so I noticed their presence and that they weren’t doing the expected thing. A middle-aged white lady strode up and snapped at them, “I need you to come pick out what you want for lunches!” and only then did I really look and notice that the girl was probably eleven or twelve and the boy a teenager, and that they’d been messing around and ignoring their surroundings, because they were kids. (In my defense he was like six feet tall.) Both children snapped to attention at their mother’s annoyance and hauled that cart out of there in a very snappy fashion.
A Black lady with a baby in one arm bent over a refrigerator case to pick something out. Next to her, a child, probably a boy, probably about four or five, jittered in place, trying to get her attention, flailing limbs and frantic tiny motion. A very tall Black man, clearly the child’s father, reached out and gently put his hand palm-down on the child’s head, lovingly and instantly stilling him. I was in motion and didn’t focus on them, but I could see the soft resigned smile on the man’s face, and it stuck with me as an image, his big hand so soft on the child’s little head, and all that frantic motion pausing.
IDK sometimes I like being in crowds when they’re not too crowded. I like the way people look at each other sometimes, and being among all that life, and so on.
went to the grocery store this afternoon. for some reason, maybe the time, maybe that i haven’t gone to this particular grocery store in a while, it was a more racially-diverse crowd than normal. (Buffalo is extremely segregated; I’m much more likely to see Indian/South Asian people than Black people, in my local neighborhood, but in the last five years or so the lines have been blurring. IDK what the stats are, but the most recent census was kind of startlingly clear-cut.)
apropos of not much, some tiny vignettes of people-watching:
a Black dad was pushing one of those carts with the two child seats and two steering wheels. One of his little boys was turning the wheel at random like little kids do, but the other one was steering like he actually knew how to steer a thing, quite competently, and I believe that child really thought he was genuinely steering the cart. (Later, we were behind them in line at checkout, and I think the boys were actually twins, or just very close in size. They had identical short-short haircuts and plaid button-down shirts.)
A pair of white people I absentmindedly thought were adults, a man and a woman, were standing next to a very full cart and behaving slightly strangely; I wasn’t paying attention but they were in the way of a thing I wanted to get to, so I noticed their presence and that they weren’t doing the expected thing. A middle-aged white lady strode up and snapped at them, “I need you to come pick out what you want for lunches!” and only then did I really look and notice that the girl was probably eleven or twelve and the boy a teenager, and that they’d been messing around and ignoring their surroundings, because they were kids. (In my defense he was like six feet tall.) Both children snapped to attention at their mother’s annoyance and hauled that cart out of there in a very snappy fashion.
A Black lady with a baby in one arm bent over a refrigerator case to pick something out. Next to her, a child, probably a boy, probably about four or five, jittered in place, trying to get her attention, flailing limbs and frantic tiny motion. A very tall Black man, clearly the child’s father, reached out and gently put his hand palm-down on the child’s head, lovingly and instantly stilling him. I was in motion and didn’t focus on them, but I could see the soft resigned smile on the man’s face, and it stuck with me as an image, his big hand so soft on the child’s little head, and all that frantic motion pausing.
IDK sometimes I like being in crowds when they’re not too crowded. I like the way people look at each other sometimes, and being among all that life, and so on.
