salvation

at the salvation army today, the clean one with ten foot rows butted up three long and seven or eight deep, the one with lots of crisp new and gently used clothing organized by someone else's logic but still legible and navigable in an intuitive way, i almost had a panic attack. thrift store shopping was once a regular way to pass time and a reason to be out in the world, in my life. but now every time i enter my hope and enthusiasm and nostalgia is zapped, i feel like there is lead in my eyes and hands, i kind of paw at a few items while my heart sinks into some tar pit of exhausted dread. it kind of makes me tired. the feeling is the weight of the place and the energy of the clothing and the tedium of sifting and the warp your brain has to do to reimagine value in so many objects. but all those experiences are also what makes finding an object you connect to so joyful and gratifying. 

the panic came somewhere while i holding the sleeve of a leather coat, or maybe it was the tan hooded suede one with the shearling lining, that cost $99.98. you know how you pinch the cuff of the sleeve and pull up and out to extend its arm in a kind of one-sided airplane move and you can then see most of the front of the coat and then the tag on the back label is also revealed. anyway this coat was $99.98. 

little red buckets are everywhere in the store with a perfect rectangular slot cut in the top to fit quarters or rolled up bills. to donate to a place where you already pay for things? and i am supposed to believe that the money in the little red buckets is kept safely in those buckets and taken straight to the poor. that the money in those buckets does not get put in the wash with the nearly one hundred dollars for that coat. the place that low income, poor people are suppose to be able to go to but clothing has out priced them but if they wait for christmas someone will come around with some of those bucket bucks.

this small older woman pushed her cart up to the counter where the clerk? salesperson? solider for the lord? lady who works or volunteers for salvation army was helping two other ladies. i didn't first hear what the older woman said or what the clerk responded but suddenly the woman was shouting, in a low but strong, firm boulder sort of way "ma'am please, i have cancer!" the ensuing confrontation revealed that the salvation army savior was not allowing the woman with a body, a body with all the expected human functions and their needs, and a body with cancer on top of and inside of all of those expected human functions, to use the bathroom. it was the meeting of two boulders. the woman behind the register truly and literally did not budge an inch in the face of the older woman's need, citing the law, apparently of the salvation army, which, i assume, always mirrors the law of god. 

lol.

anyway she would not let this woman go to the bathroom and the customers watched. including me. and when she left her cart and walked out of the store to go, perhaps to the mr goodcents across the street that the solider had suggested, they all kind of started twittering and discussing the righteousness of her firmness and the moral logic of blinding following rules set by an enormous nonprofit organization to control its stores and customers. specifically she started talking about "girls going in there..." i guess stealing. taking the second hand donated clothes and goods that the salvation army has laid claim to and must protect from the poor sinners. 

i touched a few more items as i made my way toward the back of the store, walked past the shoe racks that really smelled like shoes, not the leather or the cotton but the sweat on them. 

we were going to buy this wooden crate perfectly sized to hold CDs in their cases. we took all the CDs out of it and stacked them on the floor and went up to the register where the solider who protects the bathrooms was just walking away from her post and some new customers were at the counter with a bunch of what my mind remembers as pale colored geometric objects that were all roughly the size of square tissue boxes and seemed to be made of ceramics and maybe some were glittered and maybe some were plastic. anyway we debated for only a few moments and decided we did not want to wait, did not want to give our money, and were both just immediately needed to get out from under the weight of the place. so we placed the CD holder on top of a rack right above a row of - it was probably ten, give or take - the exact same putrid yellow polo shirts, cut from the bolt of some cold creepy sateen cotton-poly blend. 

what treasure.