There were two groceries in Sunnyvale when I was very young; The Red Rooster and The Airbase Market. The latter was named after Moffatt Field Naval Air Station where once, years before I was born, the USS Macon was housed, a dirigible airship of gigantic proportions. The hangar built especially for the airship survived into my childhood. It is still there, pointlessly huge, but an icon.
My father took me to see it when I was about ten. It’s a cathedral of steel, lofty, empty, awesome. He told me that the Macon fit into its hangar with only a few yards on all sides to spare. My imagination soared. He told me that for the airship’s first arrival they asked for volunteers to help dock it as kind of a publicity stunt, so on that day only, he became part of the landing crew. He told me that as the ship came in, it hit an updraft so had to momentarily ascend, and it took a few fellows up with it because they didn’t know to loosen their lines. Then he gave me that look that usually meant he was making stuff up, but I never knew for sure if he was.
The Macon went down in a sudden storm off the coast of California in 1935, but she lived on in the logo of the Airbase Market.
The Red Roster was a chain. They had stores in Santa Clara, Mountain View, and Sunnyvale. The scope of this vast enterprise dazzled my young mind. How could anyone organize such a complex operation and continue to maintain friendly and excellent service? I was also a little miffed that the beloved Red Rooster was not exclusively ours. The management gave away juice glasses with the store’s logo – a red rooster, of course. They were kid-sized, and I loved them as much as the store. Most everyone you visited in town had at least one of their glasses. I still own a few.
When my mother shopped at either of these markets, the checkout clerks were people she had known for years. She was able to trade stories, local news, and family information. The checkout was one of the still-vital connecting points for a community that had begun to feel the effects of modernization. Habits such as strolling main street, Murphy Avenue, were waining. The new habit was to drive everywhere, even if your trip were only a block or two. The friendly markets continued as bastions of the connecting point and to hold the key to the town’s heart.
Then in the late fifties the downtown was “redeveloped.” A great to-do was made of this. The hoopla included a ground-breaking ceremony for which a select group of elder citizens was asked to sit on the speakers’ platform, my father’s mother among them. My grandmother, who grew up near Dubrovnik, had lived in Sunnyvale for fifty years by that point and spent the ceremony grousing to her neighbors, without relief. “What a stupid idea, the town is already developed. There’s no need for this.” But as she had been awarded a gift certificate for groceries as a bribe, there she sat in her widow’s black, frowning, complaining, hands curling protectively around her purse.
The newly build “Sunnyvale Plaza” included two supermarkets, strangely located across the street from one another; a Lucky Store, and a Purity. Each was a architectural oddity designed to function as an instantly recognizable brand. One was clad in yellow tile and featured a kind of suspension bridge tower over its front door (Lucky’s) while Purity resembled a gigantic Quonset hut. Neither was particularly inviting, but they had generous parking lots. The supermarkets soon dominated.
The era of the supermarket ushered out the era of the connecting point, or nearly so. I remember my mother as never having had the least bit of trouble making and engaging in conversation at either of the old markets. It was a running dialog, you just picked up wherever you had left off on Tuesday. At Lucky’s (she preferred it to Purity… between the two, the town divided itself more rigorously than it would have in a religious schism) the checkout clerks seldom lasted more than a few months. They thus had no particular interest in forming relationships with customers. Eventually, company policy required them to chitchat, but little useful information was ever exchanged.
Occasionally, a clerk would settle in and remain long enough to become acquainted. I recall my mother surveilling the checkers to see if one of the “old timers” was working, and she would always choose that line if there was, regardless of its length. When there were none, she would steel herself to make conversation. “I just feel we ought to be saying something to each other. So, I talk. If they don’t like it, they don’t have to say anything back.”
This act of courage was thrilling to me until I was about twelve, after which I viewed it increasingly as an embarrassment. When the shopping list was short enough to fulfill and carry by hand, I offered to walk to town by myself so I could practice the more modern skill of silently passing through the checkout line. I became pretty good at it, too. But when I returned home, my mother would quiz me about my checkout experience; who I talked to, what I found out. Then, if I wanted to avoid a lecture on how important it was to connect to people, even to strangers during checkout at the supermarket, I had to make stuff up.
Just now, I strolled to San Giovenale to watch the sun set. It was five o’clock, and the church’s bells rang for several minutes. They have been rung at that time everyday for almost a thousand years, allowing for wars and such. While they were clanging my mind into a restful calm, way in the distance were five airliners approaching and departing the airport at Fiumicino near Rome. They left five evanescent trails of vapor in the deep blue sky.
I recently discovered a panificio (bakery) I like very much. It’s manned by two young Filipino men and an Italian woman of perhaps thirty. Both men are friendly, but one is so kind that being greeted by him is like coming into the company of a saint. The woman is as warm as a loaf of fresh bread. The second time I shopped, they remembered what I had ordered the first time. On my third visit, biographical information was exchanged. Now they remember not only my preferences, but sense when I want something new and help me through the process of choosing it. They also assist me with the language. I am an unremarkable one of a constant flow of customers.
Serving the public here is regarded as a skill acquired over years of observation, participation, and practice. It’s a respected and acknowledged ability. Not everyone has it. Not everyone can develop it. If you can’t, you try to find a job that doesn’t require it. Each who has it exercises the skill in his or her own fashion, and the range of style is as broad as the human personality.
The world has gone on in this way since the first goat was exchanged for a sack of grain, if not before.
The culture in Orvieto acknowledges that retail service can be the basis of a respectable career, and that the connecting points it fosters are as precious a heritage as an ancient church or piazza. What that says to this American outsider is no matter how detailed a company manual or imposing the management style, mandated chitchat and niceness doesn’t replace the real thing. Nor is it as meaningful, or as much fun.
I met three college students from Alabama the other day. Charming folk, they were good at making conversation, especially the young woman. Even she expressed relief, however, in finally meeting an American after an hour or more of mimed interaction with Italians. Foreign travel is also an acquired skill, you see, and although they were ostensibly here for art and culture, learning to travel was their real purpose.
“Our teacher has been doing these trips with students for thirty years. He always comes to Orvi
eto, and they remember what he likes to drink, his favorite things to eat, and even where he likes to sit! It’s amazing!
I’m glad they appreciate that. It is amazing, and I hope that someday they understand how tip-of-the-iceberg their teacher’s welcome here is. It will blow their minds, in a good way. And minds having been blown, perhaps they’ll find and develop connecting points in their own communities, and the torch still carried by Orvieto – and communities like it, everywhere – will continue to be passed.