The Land Lady was not stocked up yet for the winter. All the deals to be got at the dollar store, had been. Now it was time to lay in supplies from Aldi’s the discount grocer.

Outside of Aldis in the ghetto shopping center, where we were the only palefaces, we noticed the dark deities coming and going as a chocolate clerk spoke into her smart phone to the manager indoors, the two running a tally of how many customers were in the store.

As soon as we hit the sidewalk she held out her hand and said capacity had been reached at 55. I went to get a shopping cart, but unlike those at Adis in Pennsylvania, these were still locked down and not being cleaned. I did not have a quarter to get the cart so returned to the Land Lady to inform her that we might as well go to a better Aldis since we have to go find a quarter [she can’t stand or walk alone in such circumstances, being crippled] in any case and leaving the sidewalk would put us behind the 2 Africans and four darksome Americans standing behind us. The lightest skinned darksome queen was threatening the clerk about getting inside and “poor communication.”

The Land Lady did not want to have to give up her first place in line and the little clerk kept looking at me with an odd regard.

Was I her moral pillar?

Was I her imagined persecutor?

I had no idea but pulled T-rank on the Land Lady and said, “Move out, we’re gone.”

Then, as we walked off she cast a glance backwards and to my amusement noticed that without a customer leaving to make room for another, but with the paleface savage out of the line, the chocolate clerk then let all six people into the store, making that, according to her tally, 61 customers in a 55-capacity shopping zone.

…

Four-miles north in Baltimore County, we found ourselves in that Aldis, with no customer limit, surrounded by pale clerks and customers, with no tension or aggression.

The one thing that was the same, is that every person on the lot, most of those driving and everyone seen walking on the sidewalks, was wearing surgical masks outside, on this unseasonably cool and breezy Baltimore day.