And at no time was eye contact made.

I'm hustling through the Wild Oats in Evanston, because our dinner at Cross Rhodes is probably already bagged, and I can just sense my Greek fries getting colder with every aisle in which I dally. Earlier, standing at the door to our condo, I pared down my shopping list to only the next few day's essentials and I had almost escaped when Laura called out for one more item. I sighed and added it.

Now, looking over my basket and double-checking the list, just the one item remains to be found. I'm wandering down the nutritional supplements aisle, looking over the tops of shelves to adjacent aisles to get my bearings, when a young, idealistic gentlemen in a pressed Wild Oats apron approached me with a great deal of energy. His posture, his gait, every movement indicated that he was in his domain, I was his welcome guest, and he was prepared to serve my every need.

"Can I help you find something?" He spoke with a crisp, direct voice, with no discernible dialect. It was a voice full of confidence ... knowledge ... almost an intuition for what I was about to ask for.

"Uh, yeah," I said. "Where are your panty liners?"

Hmmm. I must've been wrong about the "intuition" thing.

"Oh!" His body tensed up. "Yes!" He threw his hands up, but then quickly transformed the reaction into a double-finger-pointing gesture in the direction he was now quickly striding. He whirled around the endcap and laid his hand right on a box.

"There!"

"Exactly what I was looking for. Thanks."

"Uh-huh!" Voice right back to chipper, if a little shaken. He turned his back to me and faux-straightened a shelf while I stood there faux-consulting my list.

Before I headed to the checkout lines, I noted: "Well, I think we handled that particularly well."

"Yeah!" Grocery Boy said, a little too enthusiastically.

***
A sign I once saw in the door of a Logan Square convenience store:

Hot breath Dirty body Smelly feet NO SERVICE