Hy-Vee

One late-summer Saturday when I was about twenty-two, I stood in the checkout lane of the Hy-Vee grocery store in Kirksville, Missouri fighting back tears. I’d never felt more like an outsider, and it had nothing to do with geography.

After graduating from college a few months earlier and finding myself adrift in a sea of uninspiring employment options, I’d reached for a chance to start my adult life doing something interesting and meaningful. I joined Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), which sent me on a one-year social service stint to Kirksville, way up in the northeast part of the state.

Kirksville was about as different from my Long Island hometown as an ear of field corn is from a lacrosse stick, and to me it seemed exotic and exciting. I was eager to escape a suburban culture that I found bland and stifling. Perhaps somewhere in the vast acreage of rural America I would find clues to living a life that felt more richly textured, more genuine.

Things in the national volunteer service may be different these days (VISTA is called AmeriCorps now and its mission is even more expansive). But back then volunteers were paid a very small living stipend and were prohibited from having other sources of income during their term of service. VISTA wasn’t interested in noblesse-oblige; you were expected to live in the community where you worked and make your way on low wages like everyone else.

The stipend paid the rent, but if you wanted to eat for the whole month you had no choice but to apply for public assistance in the form of food stamps. VISTA wanted you to experience the system, same as the people you were serving.

So there I was at the Hy-Vee. I’d put my groceries on the conveyer and was chatting pleasantly with the cashier as she rang up my items.

Then I opened my wallet and pulled out my food stamps.

Back then food stamps looked like multicolored Monopoly money, and you had to show a special identification card with them. Unlike using today’s more discreet swipe cards, it was obvious to anyone within a hundred-yard radius how you were paying for your food.

I pulled out the garish bills and the cashier immediately went dead silent and turned her face away from me. I noticed a look of disgust, or maybe disappointment, in her new demeanor. There was no more cheerful small talk. The transaction probably went on for another minute or two, but it felt like an hour.

Stunned, I felt as though my membership in society had suddenly been downgraded. For being visibly poor and on public relief, I had forfeited my right to simple friendliness and routine interaction.

Obviously, I knew that my middle-class upbringing, my college education, and my family’s resources meant that I didn’t have to be on food stamps; it was a choice, and it was temporary. I had options and support systems that the people I served did not.

But the cashier didn’t know that. And with her reaction and the way it knocked my confidence in my self-perception right out of me, she gave me a gift. In allowing me, for a quick moment, to step inside the experience of someone other than myself, she pushed me toward an understanding of what real empathy involves. And the realization that achieving that understanding was much more difficult than I’d thought.

I was in Kirksville on what I saw as a mission of empathy after all, and still I had to be shocked into fully comprehending it.

That’s why I’m grateful to that cashier all these years later, for pushing me down the path of genuine compassion.