Riches to Rags to Riches

The woman pushes her cart slowly down the aisle of Walmart. She pauses occasionally to take an item off a shelf and carefully place it in the cart, Tetris fashion, or to check her list that is on a notebook laying on the seat of the cart.

 She blends in with many of the shoppers around her, in jeans and the bulky sweatshirt with two very faint stains on the front that she hopes only she can see. After all, the Walmart crowd in the town she lives is a mix of people from all social and economic walks of life. A social microcosm where each individual tries either to stand out, or to blend in.

Then, in Aisle 3, the woman casually scrutinizes a lady heading in her direction. The lady is decked out in her finest, like she is headed right after this to go to dinner with the girls at Tommy Bahamas. She walks with her head held too high, almost like she thinks she is better than everyone else around her. Perfect hair, makeup, nails, jewelry. She probably will even go out to the parking lot to get into her perfect car. On her way, she will drop some money in the Salvation Army pot and be secretly proud of herself at how charitable she is to those in need. Of course, this will be after she stands in line for 15 minutes and secretly broils over how she has to demean herself by coming to Walmart with all of the town’s filth. She will stand in line and try not to touch anything, as she clutches her bag close to her and tries not to make eye contact with anyone.  But, at the same time as she tries to remain invisible, she still thrives on standing out, polished and shiny, among these grey pedestrians.

In another aisle, the woman practically runs into a man with 3 very young happy children scurrying around and past him. He tries to keep them gently under control while at the same time he holds a calculator and a slip of paper, looking at various options on the shelf and punching numbers in as he selects items and places them in his cart, already brimming with white, Walmart-brand generics. He appears to have come right from work, after picking up his 3 kids from wherever they spent the day. He is desperately trying to keep himself moving; he is tossled and smells like a garage. The woman immediately understands who he is and what he is doing, for she is there now, immersed in the survival instinct as she scrapes by from paycheck to paycheck.

As she finds her way to the freezer aisle, she is troubled. She thinks about her own appearance and how it reflects where she is in life now.  Her shabby clothes and de-jeweled hands and ears. Her messy ponytail. Her beat up car, complete with squeaks, rattles, and scratches.  

The woman wonders what the polished people think of her, if they even care. Then she wonders what they would think if they knew her story, of the beauty that she had come from, from which she had fallen out. Would the polished people, like the woman in Aisle 3, pity her? Understand? Or continue to lump her into “the Walmart kind”?

As the woman stands in line with her almost full cart, thinking about how long all of this stuff will last and how she will replenish it, her thoughts move to how the shift in her social and financial circumstances, riches to rags, has inversely affected her understanding of her quality of life and that of her children. She compares the happiness and contentment that they enjoy now, even despite the tenuous finances, with the despair and frustration of the supposed place of beauty from which she has come. In that sense, she has moved from rags to riches. She reflects on the lady from Aisle 3 and wonders if the same inverse relationship applies to her. Does she have things and money, but lack the depth of a content family group?

And what about the effect on how she views those around her? That is a rags to riches story, for once upon a time she felt about “the Walmart kind” the same way the Aisle 3 lady must feel now. A group that she had to be a part of in order to get a good deal, not that she needed it or anything. She never understood the need involved; she never needed to get a good deal before. She never needed to shave a few dollars off her shopping bill in order to make ends meet.

Rags to riches, riches to rags…the directions in which we move in our lives have lessons to teach all of us. These lessons are gifts. All we have to do is open our eyes so that we may open our hearts to those gifts. Once in receipt of those gifts, we can then share with those around us.

So, next time you are at Walmart, or anywhere different walks of life converge, try to remember that each of those individuals carries his or her own story…a story that you don’t even know the title to. If all you see is the picture on the cover, how can you know what is inside? If you don’t know what is inside, how can you make a judgment? Instead, why not give the gift of your smile, your conversation, your warmth. Who knows, you might make someone's day.