beer

I really love the moment when flip flops can become the default shoe in which to leave the house in the morning. (I am that girl who has a row of shoes under her desk, so I wear whatever shoes I want to work and then change.)

Obviously that moment only comes in northerly climes, because in other places I've lived (ah-hem, LiberiaRwandaSouthSudan), that moment is all year round, plus flip flops just aren't done except inside one's own house.*

That moment is not now. The temperature is on its way back down. But I caught a glimpse of it, and I'm clinging to that glimpse.

On my way into the grocery store to buy milk-and-only-milk (it's the end of a pay period today) after work and fighting class and more work, a man was walking briskly toward the door carrying two cases of Miller Genuine Draft. 

"Are you going to pay for that?" an employee called out, and he turned and went to the checkout line as directed.

But when I came back to the checkout lanes with my milk, he was gone, and the cases were sitting on the floor.

"He tried to do that earlier, too," an employee said, picking up the cases to put them away.

Apparently the man really wants him some beer.

...

* So this one time, in Liberia, one of my female coworkers finally pulled me aside and said, delicately, "We [the women of work] were wondering why you wear the same shoes every day?" I was amused.

And frankly, the reason that I wore the same shoes every day is because I was broke, and I was a student, and I was living out of a suitcase for the summer, and since I went to school in the cold Apple, I had spent all of my shoe budget for the previous few years on warm shoes and had to resort to a pair of sandals that I bought on the coast of Kenya to wear to work in Liberia. They only caused blisters for the first few weeks. And I only had to get them repaired once.

I slunk into work the next day in some other shoes.