You Ring; We Bring

Adjusting to special circumstance of Covid 19, grocery stores began offering a delivery service to facilitate shoppers from having to enter the premises. This is not a new concept, but a welcomed one to those unable to get to the store. In my long-past youth, I worked for a local grocery whose niche was declared by its slogan: “May’s Food Market: You Ring; We Bring”.

I must have been all of thirteen when I showed up at six o’clock for that first Saturday as a bag boy who would eventually end up being a gregarious grocer with a variety of skills culminating with sweeping the wooden floors as the place began to close around 9:30 in the evening.  At the end of that first day in my fledgling career as one of Bob May’s novitiates, I had earned a whopping $3…in cash.

By the time I entered high school, I moved up the ranks and became captain of the delivery crew.  Inkspot was my worthy associate, and we would deliver groceries to customers all over town.  You ring, and the two of us would definitely bring.  Throughout the day, people would call in their list of grocery needs, and we would scurry through the store aisles collecting the desired goods.

Probably named for that infamous singing group of the 1940’s, Inkspot was my cohort in our work, but our world would not let us be more than that because I was a white boy and he wasn’t. History and religion and politics seemed to demand the order of things, including my relationship with my “brother from another mother”. The only place we could have lunch was the Canton Sandwich Shop which was a horseshoe-shaped bar with a curtain to divide the customers by color. If we sat next to the curtain, we could talk. In spite of such nonsense, we encouraged each other’s competitive work ethic by sharing our early commercial adventures in Bob May’s WWII surplus jeep.

While our black and white worlds were segregated, we knew in our bones that we were of the same ilk and had each other’s backs if push ever came to shove — as it most certainly would when I discovered how inadvertently Jim Crow’s “separate but equal” principle created awful injustices for our “minority”, who happened to be seventy-percent of our citizens unable to vote simply because of the color of their skin. Ink and I seldom talked about Brown vs. The Board of Education nor “critical race theories” that have put local boards of education in political quagmires as a way of erasing all of the progress made over several generations.

In addition to delivering groceries, Inkspot and I would be sent out at the end of the month to “collect” from customers who had not come to the store to settle their bills.  In most instances, these were the people who lived “across the tracks” on much less income than most citizens.  We would listen to their particular plights for the month and come to some sort of understanding as to when they would meet their obligation.  There was a special little old lady for whom we would chip in from our meager pay to help her make her ends meet without ever letting Bob May know about it.  She eventually repaid us, but the tie that bound us was priceless.