Mrs. H

To protect her, I shall not name her. However, she was the thorn in my side every Thursday evening when the two grocery stores in town remained open late for business. That, in itself was a new innovation – after hours shopping!

Fortunate enough to receive a coveted “grocery store clerk” position in high school, thus freeing me from summers of detassling corn, I spent my Thursday evenings and Saturdays ringing up groceries. This entailed coming home from school and memorizing the ad in the paper for the prices of canned corn, noodles, whatever. I had approximately an hour to get those numbers in my brain before heading to the store. Of course, my nemesis had about the same amount of time to plan her weekly grocery shopping and show up at my one-woman register.

Mrs. H also memorized the ad – or at least wrote down the prices on her list. She complained to my manager nearly weekly as I would miss a price by a possible one or two cents. I blame this on the old fashioned registers we were still using. (Not quite as antiquated as the photo, but close.)

Though she was a challenge, she did help my keen powers of memorization. I became quite adept at the art and used it fully throughout my education, memorizing pages of notes for recall on tests, lines of poetry…scripts.

Okay. Thank you, Lord for Mrs. H.