How Much Is That Doggie In the Porta-Cage Plus the True Face of Love

The Little Store made a ton of money yesterday. This was kind of a shock.

Because when I came down at 9am to prep before opening, the ASPCA was setting up on the plaza to do one of their open-air adoption things.

The lady in charge had made all the dogs festive circus collars. I felt like Winston Smith –

Under the spreading chestnut tree

I sold you and you sold me

There lie they, and here lie we

Under the spreading chestnut tree…

And this was patently ridiculous, of course. Just because I was an abandoned child myself half a century ago, does not mean I can alleviate the mute suffering of every innocent victim in the world now. But I looked at those poor, helpless doggies with their ridiculous collars, sitting so hopefully in their porta-cages, wagging their tails at the sound of every human voice, and I wanted to die. Two in particular – a Bernese Mountain dog/springer mix and his cage mate, another springer mix, both eleven years old. The Bernese Mountain mix was too depressed to even way his tail and I thought: nobody will ever adopt these dogs, they're too old. And then I thought: what kind of person abandons a dog after eleven years? Though maybe it wasn't abandonment. Maybe someone died or was shuttled off to an Alzheimer's Home or had a hot sauce store that went belly-up and was forced to move into a cardboard box under the bridge. And these were even more depressing thoughts, paradigm shift from George Orwell into Gerard Manly Hopkins territory. Not for the first time I regretted the effects of a truly first-rate liberal arts education that had put all these dead writers inside my head. (It is the blight that man was born for, it is Margaret you mourn for…)

Then I started to cry. Didn't stop for hours. Rang up three hundred dollars in sales while big old tears seeped down my cheeks, ruining my mascara. My cover story had anyone asked was gonna be, "Don Knotts."

Fortunately, no one asked.

Around noon a woman wandered into the store dragging a suitcase. She was big, lumpy, ungainly – I feared for my jalapeno jelly the way she was bumping that suitcase into shelves – dressed in a plaid polyester suit with a bright yellow shirt. The shirt had a bow on it. The effect all in all was rather like the circus collar on the Bernese Mountain/springer mix. Also, she had a bad case of adult onset acne.

"Would you be interested in looking at some samples?" the woman asked with a bright nervous smile. Her voice was heavily accented.

Sure. Why not? She'd lurched into the store on one of those breaks between customer waves, and I was tired of obsessing over the Bernese Mountain Dog mix.

The first time the woman tried to open the suitcase, she made the glass shelves where I display my over-priced chili pepper kitchen ceramics shake.

"Not over there!" I squeaked. "Over here!"

Inside the suitcase, the woman had a bunch of silver-colored serving dishes wrapped in Spanish-language newspapers. "Mexican pewter," she called it. Her brother had a factory in Calisco. They recycled tin cans, melted them down, poured them into molds. A lot of grape motifs. A couple of Poblano-shaped platters.

I hesitated. I picked one up.

"How much?" I asked.

"Twelve," she said eagerly.

I did the calculations. If I bought them at twelve, I'd have to sell them at twenty-seven for any kind of profit margin. Would anyone buy a recycled tin can serving platter for twenty-seven dollars? And I couldn't really start a negotiation process, jack her price down, unless I knew I wanted to buy. That would just be cruel. The dishes were pretty in a clunky south-of-the-border kind of way. Not to my taste, of course. But then I'd go broke even faster if I only sold kitsch that I liked.

I looked closer at the dish in my hand. There it was – the lone scratch on the surface. Recycled tin cans are flimsy material. The first time one of my customers ruined the finish with their own fingernails, they'd be on that phone screaming at me for their money back.

No could do.

I sighed. "They are lovely," I lied. "But at this time – it's our slow season right now – I can't justify picking up new inventory items. Thank you so much for giving me the opportunity to see them! Maybe in the spring."

The woman sighed. Her eyes brimmed with tears. "I send my husband to get the suitcase, okay?"

Five minutes later this huge man waddles into the store. He's American, dressed even more hideously than his wife though his face is really good-humored and sweet. He stands at the counter and talks hot sauce with me for a couple of minutes. He samples the sauces on the day's tasting bar, picking up the bottles, trying to read the price tags without being obvious about it. He picks up the very cheapest one and brings it up to the cash register.

And I am thinking, no, no! This is Close That Sale 101! I know you hate hot sauce! I know you're just trying to soften me up for a future sale. Here! Let me give you that bottle of Melinda's!

I express none of this, of course. I ring the charge up. "That will be $6.50 please. Thank your wife again for me, will you?"

His face breaks into a half-embarrassed smile. "Isn't she something? I mean, I could take the samples around to stores. But there's no salesperson like a pretty girl."

And I looked at him dumbstruck. But no, he was utterly sincere.

Now, I'm not saying his wife would win a Quasimodo Lookalike contest. I'm just saying that if his wife and the Bernese Mountain Dog mix happened to compete in the Miss America pageant together, his wife would end up Miss Congeniality.

But the man did not see this. In his eyes his wife was the loveliest creature ever to walk the face of the planet.

I have looked upon Love's own true face, I thought. And I felt humbled.