Love on Christmas Eve

I changed the title on this one, as dad had called it Christmas Story, and the one prior is also called Christmas story. This one seems to me to be about ordinary moments of love.

The lines to the cashier were interminable.  Christmas Eve is no time to shop.  Now there were only three customers before me, though patron number one had filled the moving counter to capacity. Worse, she was preparing to write a check.  There would be the frantic searching of her cavernous purse for identification, the clerical notations for security, and the inevitable scanning of the double coupons to cap the liturgy of modern day shopping.

The elderly woman in front of me reached up and smoothed an errant hair over the right ear of her companion, an older gentleman who remained immobile during the process.  He was also occupied with writing a check, the book balanced, precariously, in his palm.

"You like him?" I importuned.

"Very much," she answered, her face brightening from what seemed of questionable humor when she noticed my attention

"Have you always liked him?" I probed, mischievously.

"For forty-five years," came the unexpected response from the gentleman, who did not alter his writing position.

"Yes," I proffered, "but does he like you?"

"I think so," she said reflectively.

I was surprised at the hesitancy, but she recovered quickly. "I'm sure. I'm very sure."

It was a kind of penitential response, though she smiled coquettishly, with the confidence of the loving who are loved.

I looked about me.  Nearby customers were listening to the conversation.  A smiling African-American woman offered:

"I've been married for eleven years."

"No cigar," I responded.  "There are thirty-four more years to go to match these folks."

The loving couple beamed and moved up a notch.  The clerk was completing the double coupon phase of the prior endless transaction.

"How about you?" I asked the girl just behind me.  She was young, perhaps approaching thirty.  She had remained expressionless through our improvisation.  Her hair was combed severely back, and she had an air of privacy. Nevertheless, I took a chance.

"Don't tell me," I began, "You are married perhaps three years."

"Two," she corrected.

"Your husband is a football fan, a couch potato."  There were two six packs of beer in her cart.

"No chance," she said with conviction. "Not if I can help it."

I thought of the elderly lady's gesture brushing an imaginary hair from her husband's face.  There was affection in the gesture.

I looked for softness in the young girl's face.  It was impassive.  I felt that expressions of love did not come easily from her.  She smiled with a difficulty more like reluctance.

I experienced a touch of sadness, inexplicable in this eve of the Nativity, in this season of new birth and hope and promise.  I thought I saw deep sadness in her eyes, or unfulfilled aspiration.

And she still had so many years to travel.