Air Supply

When I was a teen I worked as a carryout boy at a local grocery store.  We bagged groceries and then wheeled them out to the customers’ vehicles.  It was good, steady work. We had this older guy who came in every Wednesday night. He always brought an oxygen tank with him and would place it on the bottom of his cart, down there where you or I would place the dog food or the potatoes. He had a hose connecting the tank on the bottom of his cart to his nose.  You could hear him breathing throughout the store. He sounded like Darth Vader.  I was fascinated by the apparatus and tried to catch glimpses of it when he wasn’t looking. One Wednesday night, after bagging his groceries, I was pulling his cart out to his car. We had to pass this canopy support pole right outside the door to the store. I walked to the right of the pole pulling the cart (and the oxygen), thinking he was behind me. Well, he had zigged when I had zagged and he ended up on the left side of the pole.  Before I could correct my course of action the pole caused the hose to pull out of his nose and it hissed around the sidewalk like an angry rattlesnake.  For the next five seconds my whole young life (and his) flashed before me. I assumed I had killed the man and that I’d be heading upstate to the big house. Well, much to my relief, the man reached down, grabbed the hissing hose, and casually put it back in his nose.  I credited his quick reaction for keeping me out of prison. 

I bagged his groceries many times after that night. We never talked about the pole incident but I sensed a bond of some sort between the two of us.  Today, I think of him whenever I let the air out of a blow up pool toy.