When she found herself among many like her a week ago Tuesday at the Springfield Meijer store, she had no idea she would return home in tears.
Christel and her husband were clean out of produce. In addition to apples, oranges and onions, they needed cottage cheese, milk and a few other items.
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Christel arrived promptly at five until 7 to take advantage of Meijer’s senior shopping hour.
One reason was convenience, of course. Another involved the wisdom she gained in 16 years as an infection control professional at Mercy Medical Center.
As she’d expected, “there were fewer people and fewer dirty hands and fewer snotty noses.”
(Note to self: Remember “snotty’s” preference over “boogery” when next in the presence of infection control specialists.)
Christel’s professional eye lit up as she passed through Meijer’s automatic doors.
“I was impressed they were offering hand wipes to people. Some declined, and I wanted to say ‘Eh, hem, excuse me, those are for you.’ But I refrained,” largely out of courtesy.
Once in the aisles, she saw behavior that went beyond common courtesy.
“Everywhere, I saw people saying: ‘Oh, let me reach up there, that’s too high for you, I’ll get that and put it in your basket.’
“Or somebody would knock something on the floor, and before they had a chance (to get it), someone would say, “Here, I’ll pick that up, you don’t need to do that.
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“And, ‘Here, let me move my cart out of the way so you can get past.
“Every single aisle. I, I just -I was flabbergasted at how kind and concerned about other people everybody was.
It was the same in produce.
“‘Are you trying to reach this? Let me move down so you could reach this’ —- over and over and over again.”
A well-supplied Christel wasn’t bothered to find the toilet paper shelves at Meijer bare as a baby’s bottom. But she did leave two items short.
“There wasn’t an egg in the store, and there was no Clorox. It was gone.”
Because the latter is vital to her home disinfecting regimen, she swung north on North Bechtle Avenue for a stop at Wal-Mart, where people were just as friendly.
(A caution to readers: The following account involves the use of the “e” word.)
“There was an elderly gentleman wiping off his cart, and as I went in, he looked up and he said to me, ‘Here, you take this cart, I’ve already wiped that off … I’ll just do another one for myself.’”
The contagion of kindness “wasn’t (unique to that) day,” she said.
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Nor was it a Meijer Perk or a Wal-Mart special.
“I think it was unique to this event we’re going through.”
She finds that particularly uplifting, she said, “when you know all these people in the store are also stressed,” wondering if their husbands, wives, children or grandparents might be in danger from the coronavirus.
By the time she reached her car Christel was so moved, “I knew I was going to cry. And I don’t cry at the drop of a hat.
“By the time I got home, the tears were running down my face.”
She told her husband about what happened, then texted their two children.
“What a wonderful outcome this is, coming from a crisis.
“I was so glad I went (shopping). Had I not gone, I would not have had that experience.
“I want other people to know that in addition to the terrible things that are happening, wonderful things are happening. It was absolutely heart-warming, and I will never forget that day for as long as I live.”
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