Silent in the Supermarket

One talks to these retired garment workers, these small, stooped men and women. They have aged as they have been used. Time is supposed to weather, not crumble. Things are not supposed to take the place of people. But I walk into the neighborhood supermarket and I note how the new neonlit organic food section is crowded with the very same people who hum with the rhetoric of fashionable radicalism, while those whom our government describes as “senior citizens living on a fixed income” walk carefully down the aisles, pause as if the decisions were momentous, shrug their shoulders and pull out the cheapest package of tasteless preservative-puffed bread. It is simply a question of snatching at reality in bits and pieces. Try stan...