Baggage

The day I bought Grendel there was a sparrow in the Walmart. I spent awhile choosing my suitcase, but I spent longer watching the sparrow’s small black beak tilting this way and that, questioning the high white ceiling full of fluorescent lights. The front doors had an air lock, which would have been hard for a bird to navigate, so I assumed he must have come in from the garden center, a dismal area adjacent to the parking lot with only the most average evergreen shrubs and seasonal chrysanthemums (genus Dendranthema) in three colors: too yellow, rusty orange, and bad purple. Mounds of forced hardy mums plunked along curbs and into garden beds this time of year are my least favorite tradition of the season. I’m not a fan of using annuals in landscaping in general, and to use a hardy mum, which is a perennial, as an annual is an affront. Chrysanthemums were first cultivated in China as far back as the fifteenth century, and, along with the plum blossom, the orchid, and bamboo, it was considered one of the Four Noble Plants. Now the mum is to flowers as the Red Delicious is to apples; a ubiquitous fraud. The mums outside Walmart were arranged in long, single-color lines on aluminum bleachers facing the parking lot, their fall from grace complete. The only thing worse might be the grocery store orchid.

A young employee mistook my staring for interest. “Can I help you find something?” she asked. She was wearing gardening gloves and holding a trowel, but it wasn’t clear that she’d been planting. She was very clean.

“Oh, no, thank you,” I said.

“Hard to choose, isn’t it?” She looked at the mums with me. “They’re all so pretty. I did yellow and purple this year.”

Back inside, the sparrow wasn’t hard to find. He was making quick trips from the air space above Pet Supplies to Bedding and back, which seemed like a sound plan. Anyone in Pet Supplies would be sympathetic to his plight, but when I walked over there the section was empty. I stood beneath him for a while. The archway to the garden center was large but low, and he didn’t seem to be aware of it. I stood next to the dog food projecting flight lines. It seemed possible for him to fly out that way, but he looked confused by the lights and perhaps the Christmas music.

A woman about my age turned into the aisle and stood before the cat food. Her cart had several giant boxes of Goldfish, a dozen rolls of wrapping paper, and now the tins of cat food she was layering in.

“There’s a sparrow,” I said, pointing at the ceiling.

“Excuse me?” she said.

“There’s a sparrow up there. I think he’s trapped.”

She frowned and looked up. The little beak opened and we heard a few pitiful chirps.

“That’s too bad,” she said. “Did you tell someone?”

“No. Should we?”

“Oh,” she said, resuming her work with the cat food, “I’ve got to get home.”

“Right. I mean I could.”

She counted her tins, then looked back up at the sparrow. “I’m sure it happens all the time,” she said, beginning to push her cart out of the aisle.

“But does that make it better?” I said.

She laughed as if I’d made a joke and kept going.

In the Home Goods section it took me nearly twenty-five minutes to settle on the American Tourister Meridian 360, which was advertised as “a functional travel companion for all your fun adventures.” The bag featured a multidirectional wheel system that promised to allow me to “push, pull or turn in any direction with effortless mobility.” Hardly the help of the gods, but it wouldn’t hurt. There were several black and navy blue models, but I decided on the slate gray before realizing there was only one left in that color and it was damaged. It had a black scuff mark like a sash across the front and one of the outside zippers was bent. “We take our friends as we find them, not as we would make them,” Samuel Johnson wrote. I took the banged-up suitcase—and hoped I might get a discount at the register.

The sparrow was still chirping as I navigated back to the front of the store, but I didn’t look up.

I wanted to ask someone if birds flew into the store frequently, but my cashier was the yellow-and-purple-mum girl from the garden center.

“No mums?” she said, genuinely perplexed, when she saw me.

“No,” I said. I knew I should follow this with some nicety, but I couldn’t think of anything. “Not today,” I offered as cheerfully as I could.

She smiled and I decided to leave it at that. I didn’t ask for a discount.