Modern Times at HEB
Listen to the words.
Texas is like two other places I’ve lived, New York and California, in many important respects. Here’s one: significant numbers of people who have never been there are quite confident they know everything about the place. And in all fairness, they do know plenty. Those states are iconic and people write about them all the time, in voices filled with every imaginable thing, love and disdain, disappointment and desire. A person can be pretty well informed about these places before ever crossing the border. And none of those states are exactly what you’d call reticent. My home state, Minnesota, is suspicious of strangers, eager to keep its beautiful secrets, and driven to despair these days with wealthy coastal climate-refugees-to-be from CA/TX/NY/etc jacking up the housing prices in Duluth.
Anyway, Texas is always preceded by its reputation, and every time I want to refute its stereotypes I turn around and there they are. I have deleted a couple versions of this paragraph in which I list some of the stereotypes, but none of that feels good and besides, it isn’t important to the story. The purpose of this introduction is just to say, I wonder if what you’re thinking about Texas right now would lead you to expect what happened to me at the HEB today. I have to say I was surprised, not only because of Texas. But definitely because of it as well.
Okay, context. If you’re not from around here, you might not know what HEB is. Imagine a huge grocery store with produce, meats, dairy, lots of ready-made food, prepared ingredients to cook at home, store brands, beer and wine, some home goods, cleaning stuff, flowers, drugstore stuff, a pharmacy, grills, outdoor furniture, curbside pickup. Imagine it always being adequately staffed and having a sense of community mission. If you are in the Midwest thinking “oh sure, Kroger,” allow me to retort. If you are thinking, Meijer, Safeway, Albertson’s, anything at all, I must counter with an heartfelt neewwwwp. If you are thinking Whole Foods, please return to your castle with the other out of touch royals. If you are in MSP and thinking Lund’s/Byerly’s, or out East in the kingdom of Wegman’s, you alone are on the right track. Anyway, it’s a grocery store that we passionately and unreasonably love, and even lefties like me love HEB in spite of its inherently suspicious size and overreach. HEB kept us together during the pandemic when our own state government was trying to push us into traffic.
I just don’t think what happened today could have happened in a Kroger.
So I’m in HEB at the end of my workday, walking up to the longish pre-dinner self checkout line. I join in just behind a young dad, shorts and sandals, A&M cap. He could carry his few items in a basket like me, but he’s chosen a cart for his small son to ride in. The kid is big-eyed and sharp-faced but little, somewhere between two and three, and he’s already fussy when I get there. Young Dad is chatting with him, touching his face tenderly, making eye contact, calling him “buddy” - it’s very sweet, and it keeps the kid just on the right side of chill for a bit.
As they get to the front of the line, though, the little boy starts to wail. Young Dad reaches an experienced hand past his son and into the grocery cart, where an iPad awaits in his open backpack. Parent planning win! I start scrolling through my own phone. Sometimes the isolation of devices is just the ticket.
Then suddenly, there’s an unexpected swell of old-fashioned strings, and the sheen of a mid-century sound aesthetic.
My eyes follow my ears. The little boy is holding the iPad in his hands and looking up at his dad, his lips forming an exaggerated O. Young Dad’s mouth shapes the same O and then says, “Listen to the words, buddy.”
And just as the overmiked vibraphone notes jog my memory and I know what we’re hearing, the little boy’s face breaks into an impossibly wide grin right when Nat King Cole sings, “Smile.”
Smile though your heart is aching
Smile even though it’s breaking
They have clearly done this before. Every time the word “smile” occurs, the little kid just beams, just wildly beams, throwing back his head and shutting his eyes to give the stretchy arc of his mouth as much room on his face as possible. And YD does it right with him, a huge open-mouth version of his boy’s grin, and it’s adorable. I’ve broken into a huge smile myself. I’m enchanted. The interplay is so beautiful between these two, but I’m also just slain by the fact that YD has chosen this old classic to distract his kid in the HEB. No, not to distract, to joyfully engage.
YD notices me, and suddenly our big smiles are aimed at each other.
“I love this song!” I tell him. My voice is brighter than it’s been through this whole tired day, too enthusiastic for a stranger, but he responds in kind.
“Oh, I know! It is so beautiful, right?”
I don’t answer him, because I can’t. In that instant, we both realize that our eyes have filled with tears.
We stand there, this sweet young stranger and me, and we can’t move. We can’t make a joke or assume a posture of embarrassment. I feel like I might start weeping in earnest, or he might, or maybe all of HEB might weep except the happy, safe little boy in the cart between us.
I blink twice, fast, and moisture splashes up onto my glasses.
Open register! announces the red-shirted HEB employee. Young Dad turns toward the voice and then back to me. His eyes are soft. He is no longer smiling.
You have a good day, ma’am.
You too.
He wheels his cart forward. The little boy coos over the velvet voice of the iPad.
Several hours later, I can’t tell you what I was feeling.
I’m a human being with lots of reasons for tears - so was that dad, so are you. Maybe those reasons welled up in an unexpected moment: another terrible week in opera land, many dear people facing vulnerability outside of opera land. Or maybe it was a Scrooge-like blot of mustard (yes, I am wondering whether to believe in spiddits). I wonder if YD’s tears came from reasons, or mustard; I’ll never know.
One thing I do know for sure is that young dad was hopelessly in love with his son. I was arrested by the beauty of that father’s sweet attention to his little one - and, if I may say, by an unafraid public display of tenderness from a man. Maybe I responded to beauty, or to hope, both rare and precious things.
Or, my god, was it the simple, sheer fun of watching that kid smile? How joyous to watch all of his facial postures, this toddler still learning to mimic his grownup’s emotional physicality. The siren whine of boredom, the comic O of surprise, the face-breaking grin. It was awesome. It was moving to watch him practice telling his dad about his feelings.
So maybe it was all of that together? Maybe they had the drug, I was close enough to get a contact high, and then we just caught each other out? Nobody’s ever emotionally available in a checkout line. How can you be ready for that?
But I’m leaving out the music. Of course. That was it.
There’s Nat King Cole’s voice just to start. What a beautiful singer, someone who always sounded emotionally near. And I love this arrangement, maybe even above the other great versions of this song. I adore Nelson Riddle’s old school orchestrations without reservation, rich and unapologetically gorgeous as Viennese operetta. Squares like my parents were still listening to this music when I was little. Did my tears spring from grownup musician me, or did they belong to a long-ago little musician in training?
Was I just nostalgic for that little person, the touch of a parent’s hand, the safety of a shopping cart and a toy and the certainty that we were going home with everything we needed?
In the end, I think it might have been the song itself.
Listen to the words, buddy.
Here they are:
Smile though your heart is aching
Smile even though it's breaking
When there are clouds in the sky, you'll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Smile and maybe tomorrow
You'll see the sun come shining through for you
Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That's the time you must keep on trying
Smile, what's the use of crying?
You'll find that life is still worthwhile
If you just smile
Did you know that Charlie Chaplin wrote the melody to this song? It’s part of the soundtrack that he wrote (with Alfred Newman) for his 1936 film Modern Times; the lyrics were added later. I hadn’t thought about this film in years, but I watched it again tonight. Check it out sometime, it may surprise you as much as the idea of a Texan man being tender-hearted in public. It sure surprised me, cutting way too close to the bone.
Its major theme is the dehumanizing effect of mechanization - whaddaya know! - with secondary themes including crime, police violence, poverty, unemployment, labor unrest, and the powerlessness of the poor. Then there’s Chaplin’s Little Tramp persona, which you know even if you don’t know it - the bowler hat and cane, the funny walk. Chaplin played a beloved child-man on screen, but he was one of the film industry’s most powerful and influential actors, directors, and writers. He also pursued teenaged girls; three of his four wives were eighteen or younger. The one that wasn’t, the 22-year-old Paulette Goddard, was his co-star in Modern Times.
I mean, plus ça change, I guess.
Modern Times is part talkie and part silent, made in the Depression, on the edge of an irrevocable change. At the end of the movie, Paulette Goddard’s gamine, on the run from the cops, despairs. But Chaplin urges her to buck up and stay strong. The two set off down the road together, but not before the tramp stops the gamine and commands her to smile.
Like I said, the lyrics to Smile were added years after this film, but they speak so much to this particular American habit of faking it until you make it. Some of these lines are so toxic if you take away NKC’s soothing tones:
you'll get by
If you smile through your fear and sorrow
Or
Light up your face with gladness
Hide every trace of sadness
Although a tear may be ever so near
That's the time you must keep on trying
Toxic positivity is real. But at the same time, damn it, smiling can work. Like a little kid practicing what face to make for which emotion, a smile can lift you even if you’re not feeling it. Function sometimes follows form. It can absolutely work to square your pretty little shoulders, smile, and push on. The world tends to be nicer to you when you do, so smiling really can smooth a rough path.
It’ll cost you, though.
A smile can also be an agreement or an acquiescence. Seen from that angle, a smile can be a way to hold anything together: a self, a family, a workplace, a society. And the absence of that agreement can be what brings the walls tumbling down.
What happens to your relationships when you stop smiling to certain things?
Now increase that question by orders of magnitude until it looks like, for example: what happens to our economies if we stop saying yes to war?
Now reverse it: in order to keep a yes or prevent a no, what might people, families, workplaces, societies do? If our big system’s built on, say, overwork, how do we get people to keep smiling to it? Rise and grind, y’all!
Or maybe ask it like this: if we stop organizing ourselves along our constructed lines of gender or religion or ethnicity or race or dominion, what would our organizing principals be, and how completely would our current systems have to change? Every system we have exists by mutual agreement. How many are we willing to remake?
Look at the abject fear and strenuous crackdowns arising in response to evolving ideas all over the world, the latest widening gulfs between humans in thrall to the old or in love with the future. At this point, is it scarier to try to change, or to not try?
Did a fleeting experience of the interconnectivity of all things while standing in line at HEB cause two total strangers to smile, or to feel fear and sorrow?
When we stumble into a small divine moment like that, will we let it change us?
I wonder if Young Dad is still thinking about the strange teary lady with the Brussels sprouts. I wonder if he told Young Mom or Young Other Dad that he cried in HEB. I won’t soon forget the way he took his son’s small face in his hands.
I won’t forget the child’s total connection with one sunny word in a terribly sad song, his joyous out-of-context relationship with one velvet syllable out of the past and his ignorance of everything around it. I won’t forget the heady buzz of that magic brew in the checkout line, when music and words from the past combined with touch and love in the present. I won’t forget how his smile opened up my own, and YD’s, and how this weird, holy, non-smiley thing happened because of it.
Three generations in the grocery line at the end of days, or maybe just on Wednesday, trying to get by.
Tonight, I’m sitting here with the lights off looking at the big Super Blue Moon of August 2023 outside my window, listening to Nat King Cole.
I do believe it’s the time to keep on trying.