Tis the season…for restocking.

I went out yesterday to run a couple of errands which included a trip to the grocery store and the mall – two of my least favorite destinations. Everywhere I went, there were employees restocking shelves or doing some sort of inventory in every department I wanted to shop. This seemed especially so in JCPenney. I swear there were not that many employees during peak holiday shopping season.

This made me grouchier than usual. I understand that things have slowed down, and these retail tasks need to be done, but rounding every corner to find a pair of retail associates chatting and leisurely tagging/shelving/rearranging merchandise with the same sort of insouciance you might find on a southern front porch on an afternoon shelling beans was really too much for me.

I don’t especially enjoy shopping cheek-by-jowl in a crowd, but there’s a certain anonymity you can only find in a crowd. Having a store all to myself is my idea of at least the fourth circle of hell. I feel watched, scrutinized, judged. I was so undone, I left without buying anything.

I regrouped and went back out today – this time I had to stop at a big box store which will remain unnamed. I managed to do what I need to do, but as I struggled with my own feelings of overwhelm, I was reminded of my friend from Liberia who came to visit Virginia. The first time he stepped into a Super Walmart he broke down in tears (yes, we’ve all done it), but not because he was joyfully overcome by abundance nor for  the reasons you and I might be driven to tears (People of Walmart comes to mind – oh, the humanity!), but because it struck him as sort of…grotesque, this pornographic monument to consumption. We thought he’d be impressed. He

 wasn’t.

In the months following my return last year, I would chat with friends in Liberia. I’d say I wish I could be there with them, and they would say they wished I could be there too. It struck me that never once did they express the desire to be here or somewhere other than in Liberia. What do we make of that?

Don’t get me wrong – I think I live in the greatest gosh-darned country on the planet, hands down – and yet we are so restless and insatiable. In the world’s poorest country, among the most brutally violated populations of people, in a seemingly bottomless pool of need, I found a lot of joy, and there was freedom in having less.